Speech & Language Researchers Honored

BY BRIAN MAK

The following speech and language researchers were honored with awards at ICASSP 2008

• Abeer Alwan was elected an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to speech perception and production modeling and their applications"

• Renato De Mori was elected as a Distinguished Lecturer for 2008

• Hong-Kwang Jeff Kuo and Yuqing Gao were awarded an IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for their paper entitled "Maximum Entropy Direct Models for Speech Recognition" published in IEEE Trans on Audio, Speech and Language Processing in May 2006.

• Guoqiang Zhang, KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, was an ICASSP Best Student Paper Finalist
  with W. Bastiaan Kleijn, KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, for the paper titled "Autoregressive model-based speech packet-loss concealment"

• Blaise Thomson, University of Cambridge, and Kshitiz Kumar, Carnegie Mellon University, were awarded ICASSP Spoken Language Processing Grants. Blaise's award was for a paper entitled "Bayesian update of dialogue state for robust dialogue systems" and Kshitiz's award was for a paper entitled "Environment-invariant compensation for reverberation using post-filtering for minimum distortion".

Congratulations to all!!