Prof. Hervé Bourlard to receive the Prestigious IEEE 2022 James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award

Director of the Idiap Research Institute and Professor at EPFL, Hervé Bourlard is recognized for his major contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition. This distinction is awarded to him jointly with his colleague and long-time friend, Prof. Nelson Morgan of the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Prof. Hervé Bourlard (jointly with his colleague and long-time friend, Prof. Nelson Morgan of the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California at Berkeley), has been awarded the James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award 2022 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's leading professional association of electrical engineers, "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition.”

Established in 2002, the prize is awarded annually to a person that has made an outstanding contribution to the further development of speech and/or audio signal processing. With the selection, Prof. Bourlard belongs to an elite group of scientists from some of the world's leading research institutions. With Prof. Gunnar Fant from KTH Stockholm, Prof. Steve Young from the University of Cambridge, and Prof. Hermann Ney from RWTH, Aachen, only three Europeans have received this award.

Prof. Bourlard’s interests mainly include statistical pattern classification, signal processing, multi-channel processing, artificial neural networks, deep learning, and applied mathematics, with applications to a wide range of Information and Communication Technologies, including spoken language processing, speech and speaker recognition, language modelling, and multimodal interaction.

Prof. Bourlard, most often in collaboration with Prof. Morgan, became known for his early pioneering work on hidden Markov models applied to speech modeling, later enhanced by the use of artificial neural networks. Some of his main contributions include seminal links between artificial neural networks, linear algebra, and statistical modeling, which now form the basis of most of the current developments in deep neural networks applied to speech recognition. He has described his work in more than 400 scientific publications.

Hervé Bourlard is the recipient of several prestigious scientific and entrepreneurship awards. Among others, he is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW, “in recognition of his contribution to the development of technologies of information and promotion of Swiss technological and scientific positioning”). Director of the Idiap Research Institute since 1996, Hervé Bourlard has contributed to the growth of the institute, which is now recognized as a world leader in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

 

More information

- IEEE

- Hervé Bourlard website

- Speech & Audio Processing Group

- Berkeley's announcement