What I do
I am an Executive Director of Technical Research at AT&T Labs. My responsibilities include managing research and development in the areas of automatic speech recogntion, natural language processing, web and speech mining, multimodal voice search. Business area of focus include product strategy, corporate finance, and operation. I am a recipient of the AT&T Science and Technology Medal Award (2006).

About my Education
I am currently pursuing an MBA for Executives at Wharton Business School. I have a B.Eng and a Ph.D. with first-class honors in Electronic Engineering from The University of Liverpool. I was ranked first over the Engineering School. My thesis was on "Neural Networks for Articulatory Speech Synthesis" which is currently in a book form entitled Artificial Neural Networks for Speech Analysis/Synthesis. I was a a Research Professor with James Flanagan at the CAIP Center, Rutgers University in 1991/1992. I have over 90 publications in the area of speech and language processing, hold 21 US patents, and have over 60 patents submitted.

Major projects

• WATSON Speech Recognition: Research in robust large-vocabulary speech processing, acoustic and language modeling of speech. The project involves software development of next-generation plugin architecture to support a variety of voice applications including those for mobile, IPTV and call center automation.
• Multimodal Voice Search - The integration of VOIP with graphical browsers on desktop and mobile devices enables a new generation of multimodal services that support user input and system output over multiple modes such as speech and pen. Provides customers with information and services through any access device at anytime and anywhere.
• Natural Language Search and Web Mining: Converting the world wide web into a structured set of information for the purpose of extracting intelligent information, and the creation of interactive chat-based or spoken dialog agents. The project involves research in question/aswering and information search from conversational speech, documents and websites.
• Speech Translation: Speech-to-speech translation and human/machine translation. multilingual text and speech interfaces to existing applications. These applications range from human-machine dialog systems (eg. information access systems) to human-human dialog systems (eg. instant messaging).
• Machine Learning Supervised and unsupervised methods for active learning, active labeling and active evaluation
• Email Customer Care : The project involves email processing for the purpose of increasing response automation, reducing agents' average handeling time and improving customer satisfaction scores. Some of the core research involves language generation, information extraction, question/answering and emotion recognition.
• Spoken Language Services : Research and development into next generation conversational dialog systems including spoken language understanding, dialog management and large vocabulary speech recognition. VoiceTone is a new AT&T initiative which specializes in creating sophisticated spoken-language dialog applications for large-business customers. The goal is to automate call centers and help desks, a market that is currently valued at over $100 billion world-wide. My division is partialy responsible for the speech recognition and natural language understanding technology that is currently driving this business. We have created a new paradigm based on state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that allow us to understand natural and unconstraint large-vocabulary continuous speech and be able to automate an entire transaction. One example is an application that is currently deployed for AT&T small business customer care to handle billing and sales inquiries. Some of the underlying technologies have been previously used in the TTS Help Desk system which was recently ranked among the top 10 most innovative solutions by SpeechTech Magazine .

Professional Societies and Conferences

• General Chair of the IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology SLT2006 .
• Member of the ISCA Advisroy Council (2006-present)
• Chair of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2004-2007)
• Member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee (2000-2004)
• Chair of the CAIP industrial board at Rutgers University (2003-present).
• Associate Editor for the IEEE Transaction on Speech and Audio Processing 1995-1999.
• Chair of the IEEE 1999 workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, ASRU'99 .
• Finance Chair of the IEEE 2002 workshop on Speech Synthesis, .
• Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
• Organized several special sessions, tutorials and panel discussions. Recent ones include
  • Tutorial in IEEE ICASSP, 2002 Spoken and Multimodal Dialog Technology and Systems
  • Special session in ISCA Eurospeech, 2003: "Advanced machine learning algorithms for speech and language processing"
  • Panel discussion in IEEE ICASSP, 2004: Robust Speech Recognition in the Real World
  • Special issue in IEEE SAP Journal, 2005: Data Mining of Speech, Language and Dialog
  • Tutorial in ISCA Eurospeech, 2005: Visions, Technology and Business of Conversational Machines
  • Panel discussion at Web 2.0 conference, San Francisco, CA, Data on the Move.
  • Tutorial in ISCA Interspeech, 2006: Speech and Language Processing Over the World Wide Web
  • Show and Tell at IEEE ICASSP, 2008: Advanced demonstrations
  • Special session at ICASSP, 2008: Voice Search
  • Special issue in IEEE SPM Magazine, 2008: Spoken Language Technology
• Presenter of national seminars to the Dental Community on the topic "The High-Tech Paperless Practice" . I created Bridgepointe Family Dentistry - a state-of-the-art paperless dental practice in Metuchen, NJ.
• Teaching Professor at the Computer Science Department, Princeton University, NJ (2004-2005).

Resume, Publications, Patents