May 7, 2012

Human Language Tech Center of Excellence names director

Richard Cox, a world-renowned spoken language researcher, has been appointed director of the Johns Hopkins University–based Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.

The HLTCOE was founded in January 2007 to research all aspects of speech and language technologies. It focuses on advanced technology for automatically analyzing a wide range of speech, text and document data in multiple languages. Researchers at the center collaborate with colleagues at other institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University; Columbia University; Loyola University Maryland; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Massachusetts; University of Pennsylvania; MIT Lincoln Lab; and Raytheon BBN Technologies.

Cox has been a principal research scientist at the HLTCOE since 2009 and acting director since December 2011. Previously, he was vice president of the Speech and Image Processing Services Research Lab at AT&T Labs, with responsibility for all research in speech, audio, image, video and multimedia processing, including areas such as speech and audio coding, speaker recognition, very large vocabulary speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, spoken language translation and human hearing.

This lab was responsible for the creation of the first AT&T Labs business, Natural Voices text-to-speech synthesis, and the introduction of the first automatic call-routing system using natural language speech input. Earlier at AT&T, Cox managed the Speech Processing Software and Technology Research Department.

Cox received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton University. He is a fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), has been active in the leadership of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and was a recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000, as well as the AT&T Science & Technology Medal in 1999. He has taught at Rutgers and Princeton universities.

The HLTCOE is one of several groups at The Johns Hopkins University that jointly work on speech and language research. Whiting School of Engineering departments that take part in this work include Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Applied Mathematics and Statistics, as well as the school’s Center for Language and Speech Processing. The Applied Physics Laboratory also conducts such research.

 

Related website

Human Language Technology Center of Excellence