Alberto Ciaramella (born 1947 [1] ) is an Italian computer engineer and scientist. He is notable for extensive pioneering contributions in the field of speech technologies and applied natural language processing, most of them at CSELT and Loquendo, with the amount of 40 papers and four patents.
Ciaramella obtained the Laurea in Electronic Engineering and the Post-Laurea in 1969 at La Sapienza University in Rome with prof. Antonio Ruberti as supervisor of his thesis. Then, he joined CSELT as a research engineer.
In 1975 he patented at CSELT one of the first architecture-independent bootstrap devices that allowed the Gruppi Speciali (the first electronic Italian telephone switch and the most advanced project in Italian in the seventies [2] ) to start up by pushing a single button from a ROM memory in case of failure. [3]
During the 80s Ciaramella took part in some European projects (Esprit P26, SUNDIAL [4] ) in the pioneering field of speech recognition and dialogue systems on many European languages, such as Italian, during which he proposed a method to evaluate the quality of the dialogue systems by comparing the meanings. [5] [6]
In 1983 he co-authored one of the first international patents on speaker recognition, [7] [8] [9] a new research field at that time, applied commercially in a speech recognition software licensed by CSELT.
In 1990 he co-authored one of the first international patents of a real-time speech recognition system integrated in a microprocessor suitable for being used by a Telecommunication company: [10] [11] the microprocessor was named RIPAC (Riconoscitore di Parlato Connesso - as stated in the patent description itself). [12] [13]
Extensive research was conducted on the Hidden Markov Model aimed to speech recognition tasks, by using small such as big dictionaries and applied to many cases - e.g. the recognition of the children's voice, or browser navigation by voice. [14] Other contributions include test and proposals in international communication standards, such as VoiceXML. [15]
In 2001 the CSELT's voice technology group became Loquendo and Alberto Ciaramella became Competitive intelligence supervisor of the company.
In 2005 Ciaramella founded IntelliSemantic [16] at the Incubator of Politecnico di Torino, an innovative company that works in the field of Competitive Business Intelligence. Also within his present company, he continues the research in the field of the applied language technologies. In 2010 he co-authored a paper about his view about the application of the emerging "semantic" technologies to the patent analysis, [17] which became popular in the field of Patent Informatics, and took part in Topas European project [18] focused on patent summarization.
European Strategic Programme on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) was a series of integrated programmes of information technology research and development projects and industrial technology transfer measures. It was a European Union initiative managed by the Directorate General for Industry of the European Commission.
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the main benefit of searchability. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis.
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp, he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brandenburg was significantly involved in the founding of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and currently serves as its director.
Speaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to speaker recognition or speech recognition. Speaker verification contrasts with identification, and speaker recognition differs from speaker diarisation.
Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data.
A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel.
Gennady Simeonovich Osipov was a Russian scientist, holding a Ph.D. and a Dr. Sci. in theoretical computer science, information technologies and artificial intelligence. He was the vice-president of the Institute for Systems Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and at Bauman Moscow State Technical University. Osipov has contributed to the Theory of Dynamic Intelligent Systems and heterogeneous semantic networks used in applied intelligent systems.
Richard J. Mammone is an American engineer, inventor, entrepreneur and professor. As an inventor, he holds over 15 patents. To date, he has formed four technology companies including SpeakEZ, a firm that specialized in voice recognition technology, and Computed Anatomy Inc., the business that pioneered LASIK eye surgery.
Roberto Pieraccini is an Italian and US electrical engineer working in the field of speech recognition, natural language understanding, and spoken dialog systems. He is currently Director of Engineering at Google in Zurich, Switzerland, within the Google Assistant organization. He has been an active contributor to speech research and technology since 1981.
Loquendo is a multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Torino, Italy, that provides speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification and identification applications. Loquendo, which was founded in 2001 under the Telecom Italia Lab, also had offices in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and the United States.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni (CSELT) was an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. It played a major role internationally especially in the standardization of protocols and technologies in telecommunication: perhaps the most widely well known is the standardization of mp3. CSELT has been active from 1964 to 2001, initially as a part of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale-STET – Società Finanziaria Telefonica group, the major conglomerate of Italian public Industries in the 1960s and 1970s; it later became part of Telecom Italia Group. In 2001 was renamed TILAB as part of Telecom Italia Group.
Eloquens™ is a Text-To-Speech software, whose first version was released in 1993 by CSELT. It was the first commercial speech synthesis software able to speak Italian.
Stephen John Young is a British researcher, Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and an entrepreneur. He is one of the pioneers of automated speech recognition and statistical spoken dialogue systems. He served as the Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 2009 to 2015, responsible for planning and resources. From 2015 to 2019, he held a joint appointment between his professorship at Cambridge and Apple, where he was a senior member of the Siri development team.
MUSA was an early prototype of Speech Synthesis machine started in 1975.
RIPAC was a VLSI single-chip microprocessor designed for automatic recognition of the connected speech, one of the first of this use.
Jiebo Luo is a Chinese-American computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester and Distinguished Researcher with Goergen Institute for Data Science. He is interested in artificial intelligence, data science and computer vision.