AppTek's Director of Science to deliver opening keynote address at INTERSPEECH 2021

McLEAN, Va., June 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AppTek, a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Natural Language Processing / Understanding (NLP/U) technologies, is proud to announce that its Director of Science, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney, will be awarded the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement at the opening ceremony of this year's INTERSPEECH conference in Brno, Czech Republic, following which he will open the conference with a keynote address.

INTERSPEECH is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing.  It is hosted annually by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), a non-profit organization that promotes, in an international context, activities and exchanges in the fields related to speech communication science and technology, and is attended by the world's leading scientists. The conference showcases the latest scientific breakthroughs in speech recognition and advancements in its industrial applications, which include six papers that will be presented by Prof. Ney's science team at AppTek.

The theme of this year's conference is "Speech everywhere!", highlighting the fact that ASR models are now being integrated into larger AI systems that combine speech, vision, language and more to better adhere to human speech communication principles and optimize performance. Prof. Ney's opening keynote address will present his views on the historical development of research on speech and language processing, with an emphasis on the framework of the Bayes decision rule, which is the most important rule in data science and at the core of any modern speech recognition system.

Prof. Ney has devoted his life to pioneering data-driven methods applied to human language technologies. His work in statistical classification, machine learning and neural networks has resulted in operational research prototypes and commercial systems in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, machine translation and other tasks in natural language processing. As a result of his research, Philips introduced an innovative product for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition as early as 1993, and in 1997 a spoken dialogue system for telephone applications. Later in the Verbmobil project, his team introduced the phrase-based approach for data-driven machine translation which was eventually used as the basis for the Google Translate service, while in the TC-STAR project his team built the first research prototype for spoken language translation in real-life domains.

Prof. Ney has led teams in many large-scale European and American projects (GALE, BOLT, TC-STAR and Quaero, among many others), resulting in 700+ conference and journal papers, with an h index of 100+ and over 60,000 citations according to Google Scholar. Over 50 of his former PhD students currently work in speech and language technology, including 32 PhDs today at AppTek, as well as other large companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Lilt and Nuance.

"There aren't many people in the world that have contributed as much in the field of AI and machine learning applied to cognition in automatic speech recognition, machine translation and natural language", said AppTek's CEO, Mudar Yaghi. "We are honored to have Prof. Ney lead our scientific endeavors. AppTek continues to innovate in the science of automatic speech recognition, neural machine translation, text-to-speech and conversational AI under his scientific leadership". 

The 2021 INTERSPEECH conference takes place in a hybrid format, in Brno, Czech Republic, from 30^th August to 3^rd September. You can find more information about the conference program and how to register here.

About AppTek
AppTek is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U) and text-to-speech (TTS). The AppTek platform delivers industry-leading, real-time streaming and batch technology solutions in the cloud or on-premise for organizations across a breadth of global markets, such as media and entertainment, call centers, government, enterprise business, and more. Built by scientists and research engineers who are recognized among the best in the world, AppTek's solutions cover a wide array of languages, dialects and channels. For more information, please visit http://www.apptek.com.

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SOURCE AppTek