The safety and well-being of our participants is of paramount importance to ISCA. The Organizing Committee of INTERSPEECH 2020 has been monitoring closely the dynamic developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. After careful consideration and in light of the global health emergency and pervasive travel restrictions, ISCA has made the difficult decision to convert INTERSPEECH 2020 to a fully virtual conference.
    We were looking forward to seeing everyone at INTERSPEECH in Shanghai, but we are excited about the opportunity to innovate by creating an engaging virtual conference that will be rewarding for both presenters and attendees.
    Timely information for authors and questions about registration and participation are provided below.  Please stay tuned for our announcements on registrations.

Information for Authors of Accepted Papers
    Since we are no longer limited by physical space, both oral and poster papers will have the same presentation style.  Each paper will need to:
i. Submit a two-slide “highlight” presentation (with one title slide, one overview slide, together with a voice-over less than 1.5minutes in duration) video (mp4 format) of the paper by September 15, 2020. 
ii. Submit 15-minute video-recorded paper presentation by October 2, 2020.
iii. Designate an author to be available for the Q&A activities related to their paper during the conference session.
    Authors that do not meet these 3 requirements will be considered “no-shows”.

Organization of Virtual Conference Sessions
    The conference will take place between October 25-29, 2020. We expect most participants will still commit their time during this window to participate in the conference, and have discussions with fellow researchers around the world. 
    With due consideration devoted to time zone differences around the world, conference activities will be constrained to approximately 5 hours per day.  Hence, paper session will adopt a different format.  The papers and presentations will be made available by October 19, 2020 on the conference website, with a link to the “Zoom room” and also a link to the “Q&A zone” for EACH session.  Each paper session will have no more than 10 papers.  Conference participants can type in questions into the “Q&A zone” of each session at any time during the conference.  Authors can also type in corresponding answers in the chat room.  Each live paper session will be 1 hour in duration, managed by the Session Chairs and supported technically by a conference volunteer.  The Session Chair(s) will help moderate the rundown with 5 minutes devoted to each paper – which includes playing the short “highlight” video presentation (< 1.5 minutes in duration), followed by about 3.5 minutes for Q&A. The Q&A is interactive in that Session Chairs will select questions from the “Q&A zone” to ask the presenter, who will answer, and the entire live interaction will be video-recorded.  After all the papers are presented, the remaining time (about 10 minutes) will be an open Q&A session, where the Session Chair can select questions about any paper in the session from the chat room and invite the corresponding presented to answer.  After the live session is complete, the video-recording will be made available on the conference website for the corresponding session.  Also, session's Q&A Zone will be maintained until November 5, so that conference participants can continue to type in questions in the Q&A Zone and authors can type in answers. 

Conference Registration Fee
    A conference registration will provide each participant with an access code to participate in the sessions.  For authors, a full registration is required for each accepted papers to be considered for inclusion into INTERSPEECH proceedings.  Registration funds collected will be used to support the infrastructure needed to host and support the virtual conference.  We will have reduced registration fees this year and look forward to an increase in conference participants.

Tutorials and Additional Conference Content
    We will send details soon for additional technical events purchased during INTERSPEECH registration, including tutorials and workshops, and we are exploring ways to provide this content virtually as well.