SLTC Elects New Members

BY MICHAEL L. SELTZER

In the fall of 2007, the SLTC elected 7 new members to replace 7 members whose three year term on the committee ended at the conclusion of 2007. We would like to thank Jean-Claude Junqua, Peter Kabal, Hisashi Kawai, Tomoko Matsui, Roger Moore, Shri Narayanan,  and Yunxin Zhao for their hard work and dedication during their tenure on the SLTC.

We also welcome the 7 new members to the SLTC, whose three year term began on January 1, 2008.

Jont B. Allen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Jont Allen received a BS in EE from the University of Illinois in 1966, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. He then joined Bell Laboratories in 1970, where he was in the Acoustics Research Department as a Distinguished member of Technical Staff.  From 1996-2002 he worked at AT&T Labs as a Technology Leader. Allen is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and IEEE.  In Aug. of 2003 he join the ECE faculty, University of IL, UIUC.  Dr. Allen is interested in on cochlear modeling, noninvasive diagnostic testing of cochlear function (such as DPOAE and power reflectance measurements in the ear canal), auditory psychophysics, speech processing for hearing aid applications (noise reduction and multiband compression), speech and music coding (bit-rate reduction) and speech perception (models of loudness and masking) and many aspects of acoustics.  He is presently working on the theory and practice of human speech recognition, with the goal of improving automatic speech recognition robustness in the presences of noise and filtering.

Frederic Bechet LIA, University of Avignon

Frederic Bechet obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 1994 and has been a Professor Assistant at the University of Avignon (France) since 1995. He is a researcher at the computer laboratory of the university (LIA). He was an invited professor for one year at AT&T Research Lab in Florham Park, New Jersey, USA, from August 2001 until September 2002, working within the "How May I Help You?" research project. Frederic Bechet is the author/co-author of over 50 refereed papers in journals and international conferences and hold two patents. He has served on the reviewing committees of several international conferences (ICASSP, Interspeech, ASRU, HLT, EMNLP) and has been an invited reviewer for several journals including: Speech Communication, IEEE Signal Processing Letters and IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. Frederic Bechet is a member of the following scientific organizations: IEEE SPS,ISCA, ACL, AFCP (French Speech association) and ATALA (French NLP association). His research activities are mainly focused on Spoken Language Understanding for both Spoken Dialogue Systems and Speech Mining applications.

Jean-Francois Bonastre LIA, University of Avignon

Jean-Francois Bonastre is Associate Professor at the LIA, University of Avignon, France, since September 1994. He took his degrees in Computer Science at the University of Marseille, his PhD concerning automatic speaker identification at Avignon in 1994. In 2000, he obtained an HDR (Habilitation in Research Direction) in the same topic. J-F Bonastre was an invited professor at Panasonic Speech Technolgy Laboratory (Santa Barbara) during one year (in 2002-2003). He joined the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) in February 2007. At the University of Avignon, he is responsible of the PhD program and a member of the scientific council of the university.

J-F Bonastre is Vice-President of the ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) and the former Chairman of AFCP, the French Speaking Speech Communication Association. J.F. Bonastre is Senior Member of IEEE and he was elected to the IEEE/SLTC in October 2007. He organized several workshops and conferences and is currently a permanent member of the organization committee of ISCA/IEEE "Speaker Odyssey" workshops. He is participating in several international conference program or scientific committees (Interspeech, ICASSP, EUSIPCO, ICPR, etc) and is a reviewer for several journals like Speech Communication, JASA, Signal Processing, Digital Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transaction of Acoustic, Speech and Language Processing (IEEE/TSALP). He was also Guest Editor for TSALP.

Timothy J. Hazen MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Timothy J. Hazen received an S.B. in 1991, an S.M. in 1993, and a Ph.D. in 1998, all from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Hazen is currently a member of the Information Systems Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory . From 1998 until 2007, he was a Research Scientist in the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in the areas of speech recognition and understanding, audio indexing, speaker identification, language identification, multi-lingual speech processing, and multi-modal speech processing. Dr. Hazen has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2004-2007). He is currently a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Speech and Language Technical Committee.

Alexandros Potamianos Technical University of Crete

Alexandros Potamianos received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1990. He received the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA in 1991 and 1995, respectively. He received the M.B.A. degree from Stern School of Business, NYU in 2002. From 1991 to June 1993 he was a research assistant at the Robotics Lab, Harvard University. From 1993 to 1995 he was a research assistant at the Digital Signal Processing Lab at Georgia Tech. From 1995 to 1999 he was a Senior Technical Staff Member at the Speech and Image Processing Lab, AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park, NJ. From 1999 to 2002 he was a Technical Staff Member and Technical Supervisor at the Multimedia Communications Lab at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ. From 1999 to 2001 he was an adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Columbia University, New York, NY. In the spring of 2003, he joined the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece as an associate professor.

His current research interests include speech processing, analysis, synthesis and recognition, dialog and multi-modal systems, nonlinear signal processing, natural language understanding, artificial intelligence and multimodal child-computer interaction. Prof. Potamianos has authored or co-authored over sixty papers in professional journals and conferences. He is the co-author of the paper "Creating conversational interfaces for children" that received a 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award. He holds four patents. He has been a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 1992 and he has served as a member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee from 2000 to 2003.

Frank K. Soong Microsoft Research Asia

Frank Soong is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager of the Speech Group at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing.

Yannis Stylianou University of Crete

Yannis Stylianou is Associate Professor at University of Crete, Department of Computer Science, CSD UOC and Associate Researcher in the Networks and Telecommunications Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science ICS at FORTH. He received the Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University, N.T.U.A., of Athens in 1991 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Signal Processing from the Ecole National Superieure des Telecommunications, ENST, Paris, France in 1992 and 1996, respectively. From 1996 until 2001 he was with AT&T Labs Research (Murray Hill and Florham Park, NJ, USA) as a Senior Technical Staff Member. In 2001 he joined Bell-Labs Lucent Technologies, in Murray Hill, NJ, USA (now Alcatel-Lucent). Since 2002 he is with the Computer Science Department at the University of Crete and the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH. He is member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee and Associate Editor of the EURASIP Journal on Speech, Audio, and Music Processing, ASMP, and of the EURASIP Research Letters in Signal Processing, RLSP. He is Vice-Chairman of the Cost Action 2103: "Advanced Voice Function Assessment", VOICE. He was Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters and on the Management Committee for the COST Action 277: "Nonlinear Speech Processing". He holds 9 patents and he is member of IEEE and of the Technical Chamber of Greece, TEE. His current research focuses on speech signal processing algorithms for speech analysis, statistical signal processing (detection and estimation), and time-series analysis/modeling.