Natural Language Interaction Today-Selected Perspectives

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Speaker Details

Alex Acero is research area manager in Microsoft Research, directing an organization with 60 engineers working on audio, multimedia, communication, speech, and natural language. He is also an affiliate professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. He received a M.S. degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, in 1985; a M.S. degree from Rice University, Houston, TX, in 1987; and a Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 1990, all in Electrical Engineering. Dr. Acero worked in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group during 1990–1991. In 1992, he joined Telefonica I+D, Madrid, Spain, as manager of the speech technology group. Since 1994, he has been with Microsoft Research.

Dr. Acero is a Fellow of IEEE. He has served the IEEE Signal Processing Society as Vice President Technical Directions (2007–2009), Director Industrial Relations (2009–2011), 2006 Distinguished Lecturer, member of the Board of Governors (2004–2005), associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2003–2005) and IEEE Transactions of Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2005–2007), and member of the editorial board of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2006–2008) and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2008–2010). He also served as member (1996–2000) and Chair (2000–2002) of the Speech Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was Publications Chair of ICASSP98, Sponsorship Chair of the 1999 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, and General Co-Chair of the 2001 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding. Dr. Acero served as member of the editorial board of Computer Speech and Language and member of Carnegie Mellon University Dean’s Leadership Council for College of Engineering.

Dr. Acero is author of the books Acoustical and Environmental Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition (Kluwer, 1993) and Spoken Language Processing (Prentice Hall, 2001), has written invited chapters in 4 edited books and 200 technical papers. He holds 78 U.S. patents. Since 2004, Dr. Acero, along with co-authors Drs. Huang and Hon, has been using proceeds from their textbook Spoken Language Processing to fund the “IEEE Spoken Language Processing Student Travel Grant” for the best ICASSP student papers in the speech area.

Dr. Rudnicky’s research has spanned many aspects of spoken language, including knowledge-based recognition systems, language modeling, architectures for spoken language systems, multi-modal interaction, the design of speech interfaces, and the rapid prototyping of speech-to-speech translation systems. Dr. Rudnicky has been active in research into spoken dialog, and has made contributions to dialog management, language generation, and the computation of confidence metrics for recognition and understanding. His recent interests include the automatic creation of summaries from event streams, automated meeting understanding and summarization, and language-based human-robot communication. Dr. Rudnicky is currently a principal systems scientist in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University and is on the faculty of its Language Technologies Institute.

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Date:

July 13, 2010

Speakers:

Alex Acero and Alexander Rudnicky