Karen Livescu is an American computer scientist specializing in speech processing and natural language processing, and applications of deep learning to these topics. She is a professor in the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and a part-time associate professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.
Livescu majored in physics at Princeton University, graduating in 1996 with an honors thesis on signal processing in speech supervised by computer scientist Kenneth Steiglitz. After visiting the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, she received a master's degree in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2005 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [1] Her doctoral dissertation, Feature-Based Pronunciation Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition, was supervised by James Glass. [1] [2]
She became a Clare Boothe Luce Postdoctoral Lecturer at MIT, and then a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute, before becoming a regular-rank assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute in 2008. In 2009 she added a part-time faculty position in the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago. She was promoted to associate professor at both the Toyota Technological Institute and the University of Chicago in 2017, and to full professor at the Toyota Technological Institute in 2021. [1]
Livescu was named a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association in 2021, "for contributions to articulatory modeling, to speech representation learning, and to bridging the gaps between speech research, machine learning and natural language processing". [3] She was named to the 2025 class of IEEE Fellows "for contributions to multi-view and pre-trained speech representation learning". [4]
Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in the biomedical sciences. Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.
Thomas Shi-Tao Huang was a Chinese-born Taiwanese-American computer scientist and electrical engineer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.
Johanna Doris Moore is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Her research publications include contributions to natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, computational models of discourse, intelligent tutoring and training systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, and knowledge representation.
Avrim Louis Blum is a computer scientist. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to learning theory and algorithms." Blum attended MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in 1991 under professor Ron Rivest. He was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University from 1991 to 2017.
Dominic W. Massaro is professor of Psychology and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is best known for his fuzzy logical model of perception, and more recently, for his development of the computer-animated talking head Baldi. Massaro is director of the Perceptual Science Laboratory, past president of the Society for Computers in Psychology, book review editor for the American Journal of Psychology, founding Chair of UCSC's Digital Arts and New Media program, and was founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Interpreting. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a University of Wisconsin Romnes Fellow, a James McKeen Cattell Fellow, an NIMH Fellow, and in 2006 was recognized as a Tech Museum Award Laureate.
Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.
Roberto Pieraccini is an Italian and US electrical engineer working in the field of speech recognition, natural language understanding, and spoken dialog systems. He has been an active contributor to speech language research and technology since 1981. He is currently the Chief Scientist of Uniphore, a conversational automation technology company.
Mohammad Salameh Obaidat is a Jordanian American Academic/ Computer Engineer/computer Scientist and Founding Dean of College of Computing and Informatics at the University of Sharjah, UAE. He is the Past President & Chair of Board of Directors of and a Fellow of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS), and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to adaptive learning, pattern recognition and system simulation . He was born in Jordan to The Obaidat known Family. He is the cousin of the Former Prime Minister of Jordan, Ahmed Obaidat and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer engineering from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. He is known for his contributions in the fields of cybersecurity, Biometrics-based Cybersecurity, wireless networks, modeling and simulation, AI/Data Analytics. He served as President and Char of Board of Directors of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International, SCS, a Tenured Professor & Chair of Department of Computer Science at Monmouth University, Tenured Professor & Chair of Department of computer and Information Sciences at Fordham University, USA, Dean of College of Engineering at Prince Sultan University, and Advisor to the President of Philadelphia University for Research, Development and IT. He has chaired numerous international conferences and has given numerous keynote speeches.
Shrikanth Narayanan is an Indian-American Professor at the University of Southern California. He is an interdisciplinary engineer–scientist with a focus on human-centered signal processing and machine intelligence with speech and spoken language processing at its core. A prolific award-winning researcher, educator, and inventor, with hundreds of publications and a number of acclaimed patents to his credit, he has pioneered several research areas including in computational speech science, speech and human language technologies, audio, music and multimedia engineering, human sensing and imaging technologies, emotions research and affective computing, behavioral signal processing, and computational media intelligence. His technical contributions cover a range of applications including in defense, security, health, education, media, and the arts. His contributions continue to impact numerous domains including in human health, national defense/intelligence, and the media arts including in using technologies that facilitate awareness and support of diversity and inclusion. His award-winning patents have contributed to the proliferation of speech technologies on the cloud and on mobile devices and in enabling novel emotion-aware artificial intelligence technologies.
Bayya Yegnanarayana is an INSA Senior Scientist at International Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He is an eminent professor and is known for his contributions in Digital Signal Processing, Speech Signal Processing, Artificial Neural Networks and related areas. He has guided about 39 PhD theses, 43 MS theses and 65 MTech projects. He was the General Chair for the international conference, INTERSPEECH 2018, held at Hyderabad. He also holds the positions as Distinguished Professor, IIT Hyderabad and an Adjunct Faculty, IIT Tirupati.
Biing Hwang "Fred" Juang is a communication and information scientist, best known for his work in speech coding, speech recognition and acoustic signal processing. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002 as Motorola Foundation Chair Professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Lori Faith Lamel is a speech processing researcher known for her work with the TIMIT corpus of American English speech and for her work on voice activity detection, speaker recognition, and other non-linguistic inferences from speech signals. She works for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a senior research scientist in the Spoken Language Processing Group of the Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur.
Abeer Alwan is an American electrical engineer and speech processing researcher. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and vice chair for undergraduate affairs in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Tara N. Sainath is an American computer scientist whose research involves deep learning applied to speech recognition. She is a principal research scientist at Google Research.
Yang Liu is a Chinese and American computer scientist specializing in speech processing and natural language processing, and a senior principal scientist for Amazon.
Avideh Zakhor is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, the Qualcomm Chair in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research involves video processing including video coding, decoding, and streaming, as well as urban-scale 3D modeling.
Dilek Z. Hakkani-Tür is a Turkish-American computer scientist focusing on speech processing, speech recognition, and dialogue systems. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Isabel Maria Martins Trancoso is a retired Portuguese computer scientist specializing in speech processing. She is a professor in the Instituto Superior Técnico, a former president of the scientific council of INESC-ID, the former editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, and a former president of the International Speech Communication Association.
Melike Erol-Kantarci is a Turkish-Canadian computer scientist whose research involves wireless sensor networks, smart grids, the artificial intelligence of things, and 6G wireless communication. She is a full professor in the University of Ottawa School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where she holds a tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence-Enabled, Next-Generation Wireless Networks; she also works for Ericsson as Strategic Product Manager for AI in RAN.
Jiaying Liu is a Chinese computer scientist whose research in computer vision includes highly-cited work on low-light enhancement, raindrop removal, and the recognition of human actions. She is an associate professor and Boya Young Fellow in the Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology of Peking University.