Hynek Hermansky is the Julian S. Smith Professor of the Electrical Engineering and the Director of Centre for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.  His main research interests are in bio-inspired speech processing. He has been working in speech research for over 30 years, previously as a Director of Research at the IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny and a Titular Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, a Professor and Director of the Center for Information Processing at OHSU Portland, Oregon, a Senior Member of Research Staff at U S WEST Advanced Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, a Research Engineer at Panasonic Technologies in Santa Barbara, California, a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and an Assistant Professor at the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.  He is a Fellow of IEEE for “Invention and development of perceptually-based speech processing methods”, and a Fellow of International Speech Communication Association for “Pioneering bio-inspired approaches to processing of speech”. He is the holder of the 2013 International Speech Communication Association Medal for Scientific Achievement, is a Member of The Board of the International Speech Communication Association, and a Member of the Editorial Board of Speech Communication. He was the General Chair of the 2013 ICASSP Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, a Member of the Organizing Committee at the 2011 ICASSP in Prague, Technical Chair at the 1998 ICASSP in Seattle and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transaction on Speech and Audio. He holds 10 US patents and authored or co-authored over 200 papers in reviewed journals and conference proceedings. His speech processing techniques such as Perceptual Linear Prediction, RASTA spectral filtering, multi-stream speech information processing or data-driven discriminative Tandem technique are widely used in research laboratories worldwide as well as in industrial applications.  Prof. Hermansky holds Dr.Eng. degree from the University of Tokyo, and Dipl. Ing. degree from Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. His talk takes place on Thursday, July 3, 1pm, at E104.

My Adventures with Speech

Abstract: I intend to mention some techniques I got involved in during the past 40 years. I will not dwell too much on details of the techniques. These are documented in various publications.  Rather, I will try to talk about things which we, researchers, may say in private but seldom write about: about personal intuitions and beliefs, about excitements,  frustrations, surprises, and interesting encounters on the road, while struggling to understand and emulate one of the most significant achievements of human race, the ability to communicate by speech.