Page 10 - Fall2020

vowels contribute more information to intelligibility than consonants. To apply acoustics more broadly, in 1990, colleagues and I founded a small business, Communica- tions Disorders Technology, to develop a computer-based speech training aid. Straddling academics and business in my career has been very satisfying. Throughout the years, it has been especially meaningful to have served the ASA in many capacities: on the Technical Council, consulting for online publications, and in leadership.
Changes in The Acoustical Society of America Meetings 2020
It is an honor to have been elected in 2019 to serve as
president of the ASA. However, my expectations for the presidency were abruptly altered in spring 2020 when the governor of Illinois prohibited conferences due to the pandemic. The ASA and most scientific societies faced difficult decisions about their forthcoming meetings. Pres- ident Sparrow and Executive Director Susan Fox worked rapidly to make significant meeting changes in the May 2020 meeting by rescheduling that meeting to December 2020. Regrettably, these changes led to the cancellation of the Cancun (Mexico) meeting, a meeting that has been popular and successful twice before. However, after only one month as ASA president, I am overseeing still more changes in 2020 meetings because of the uncertainty of the pandemic. Our December meeting will now be virtual, as I describe in more detail below. First, I report how the ASA conducted administrative meetings online in May 2020.
Yet a missing component in May was the Plenary Session open to the whole Society. Our Plenary honors our award- ees, introduces the new Fellows, and provides updates about the status of the Society, especially future meetings. In the spirit of the Plenary, be sure to check out the videos on our home page (see acousticalsociety.org) that the lead- ership recorded. President Sparrow read the names of the medals and prize winners who will be acknowledged appropriately at the December Plenary (listed in this issue on page 70). Vice President Nelson recognized the achievements of the newly elected Fellows who will also be acknowledged at the next Plenary. For my first video, I talked about plans for future meetings and thanked President Sparrow and Vice President Nelson for their outstanding year of service to the ASA.
A very important outcome of the online administrative meetings came from the Technical Council. Hooray for the chairs of each technical area and Vice President Peggy Nelson who rearranged previously offered special ses- sions to enable exciting and vibrant special sessions for coming meetings. About 60 special sessions were sched- uled for the December meeting and an additional 75 for the spring 2021 meeting in Seattle (WA). These commit- ments assure that the acoustics shared at our scientific meetings will continue to be strong. The expectation is that most of the special sessions scheduled for December will still be presented in one of the many virtual formats that are available for us to choose from.
To make future plans for ASA meetings, leadership
decided that the ASA administrative and business meet-
ings planned for May would be held online. An immense
thank you goes to our amazing ASA staff who worked hard
to schedule and manage about 50 administrative meet-
ings online. Working along with the Executive Council and
meeting chairs, Zoom, GoToMeeting, and other online
platforms were selected and mastered. Security features
had to be implemented to allow executive sessions to be
completely private. On the other hand, high attendance
was to be encouraged, along with voting, for the open
meetings of the Technical Committees (TCs). Indeed, “Sound Perspectives” piece in the summer 2020 issue of
these open TC meetings were well attended, with Archi- tectural Acoustics having 118 participants and several others over 90.
Acoustics Today for details; available at bit.ly/2Ylpy00). It will have upgraded features such as becoming a Gold open-access publication. Also notable for publications was
In May, the Executive Council heard additional evidence of the ASA position as a global leader in acoustics based on news from in our publications. In our flagship pub- lication, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), both the number of submissions and number of published articles in 2019 increased and, so far, look com- parable this year. The themed Special Issues have exceeded expectations in readership. The big news is that final plans for JASA Express Letters to become its own independent journal are in place. This online-only journal, to be called JASA Express Letters, will begin January 1, 2021 (see the
10 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020