AVISA (the Auditory-VIsual Speech Association), which was the second ISCA Special Interest Group (SIG) to form, starting its official business on December 5, 1998, at the AVSP'98 (Auditory Visual Speech Processing) meeting in Terrigal, New South Wales, Australia. AVISA was first conceived by Christian Benoît, who wanted to see the auditory-visual speech community come together in a more formal way. Before his untimely death, Christian drafted a proposal to create AVISA. We are proud to dedicate this SIG to Christian's memory.

AVISA was created to promote interest and activity in auditory-visual speech processing and related areas. The AVISA objectives are to:

• create a scientific link between researchers and others working in the various disciplines associated with audio-visual speech processing by humans or by machines;
• facilitate better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in the production and perception of audio-visual speech communication through the audible and visible gestures of the vocal tract and of associated body gestures;
• facilitate the modelling of speech gestures for realistic animation of synthetic actors and for automatic recognition of linguistic and communicative gestures transmitted through the auditory and visual modalities;
• share linguistic knowledge through the study of audio-visual speech in as many languages as possible, including sign languages and cued speech;
• favor the worldwide dissemination of knowledge, and make it available to the international community, in particular to students of speech science, clinicians and industrialists.

To attain these goals, AVISA will:

• organize and support scientific events (workshops, special sessions in conferences, summer schools); in particular, AVISA will support the continuation of the AVSP meetings, and will sponsor sessions at other meetings, such as the Interspeech meetings, EUROSPEECH and ICSLP;
• publish or help publish scientific articles in the proceedings of conferences, in special issues of international journals, books, etc.;
• disseminate or help disseminate scientific articles, computer resources, audio-visual data, video tapes, and other relevant material;
• keep its members informed of the AVISA activities and of any relevant information on audio-visual speech research and techniques through the AVISA websites, electronic mailing, newsletters of related associations, and journals.

We are open to suggestions from all who are interested in participating. Please join us and provide feedback, news, opinions, etc., related to AV speech. To join AVISA and be placed on the AVISA mailing list, contact Denis Burnham at: d.burnham@uws.edu.au .

Any questions about SIGs should be addressed to Valerie Hazan at sig@isca-speech.org.

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