Eric Chang joined Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)in July, 1999 to work in the area of speech technologies. Eric is currently the Senior Director of Technology Strategy and Communications of MSR Asia, where his responsibilities include communications, IP portfolio management, and driving new research themes such as eHealth. Prior to his new responsibilities at MSR Asia, Eric co-founded Microsoft Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in 2003 as the Assistant Managing Director.  At ATC, Eric led teams to ship features for Windows and Windows Mobile and started a multi-disciplinary incubation team.  Before joining ATC, Eric was the research manager of the speech group at MSRA and the acting University Relations Director for one year. A technology transfer result from his group is the Chinese version of Office XP, which incorporates the Mandarin speech recognition engine developed at Microsoft Research Asia.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Eric was one of the founding members of the Research group at Nuance Communications, a pioneer in natural speech interface software for telecommunication systems. While at Nuance, Eric worked on various projects involving confidence score generation, acoustic modeling, and robust speech detection. He also led the technical effort to develop the Japanese version of the Nuance product. This project led to the world's first deployed Japanese natural language speech recognition system.

Eric has also developed speech recognition algorithms at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, invented a new circuit optimization technique at Toshiba ULSI Research Center, and conducted pattern recognition research at General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center.

Eric graduated from M.I.T.with Ph.D., Master and Bachelor degrees, all in the field of electrical engineering and computer science. While at M.I.T., he was inducted into the honorary societies Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi. Eric is also a Senior Member of IEEE.

Eric has published papers in the fields of speech recognition, neural networks, and genetic algorithms in various journals and conferences. He is the author of several granted and pending patents. His research interests are spoken language understanding, machine learning, and signal processing.

Professional Activities:

Editorial Board Member, Computer Speech and Language.

Visiting Professor, Nankai University and Zhejiang University

Program Committee Member, 6th National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication ((NCMMSC 2001).

Program Committee Member, International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing 2000.

Guest Lecturer, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, NIPS, Computer Speech and Language.

Program Committee Member, Pervasive Health 2010

Publications:

Ph.D. thesis: Improving Wordspotting Performance with Limited Training Data