VoiceBox Adds Nine New Members to Growing Scientific Advisory Board

BELLEVUE, Wash., July 6, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- VoiceBox Technologies, the award-winning innovator of Contextual Natural Language Understanding (CNLU) and next gen Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI), today announced nine new members to its Scientific Advisory Board. The diverse, world-class roster represents VoiceBox's continued investment in its broader strategy to become a unifying interface for the Internet of Things.

Board members include distinguished researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), multimodal human-computer interaction, biometrics, speech recognition, natural language understanding and dialog processing technologies. The new members hail from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Colorado, University of Rochester and University of Edinburgh.

"Our vision of a common, intelligent interface – multi-device, cross-device and multi-user – integrates exciting new technologies to supplement our advanced voice offerings," said Mike Kennewick, VoiceBox's co-Founder, chairman and CEO. "With the expertise of world-renowned minds across the globe, we are able to access a fount of knowledge that rivals the largest companies in our industry."

Providing insight and direction to VoiceBox's technology initiatives, the Scientific Advisory Board will build on the company's rapid growth and pioneering work in contextual NLU and Voice AI.

The nine new members join the original five to round out a cadre of 14 advisors. The new members include:

Prof. Hynek Hermansky – Johns Hopkins University 
Prof. Hynek Hermansky is a Whiting School of Engineering Julian S. Smith Endowed Professor in Electrical Engineering and the Director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Prof. Hermansky is also a Research Professor at the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. His main research interests are in bio-inspired speech processing. He has been working in speech research for over 30 years, holds 10 US patents and has authored or co-authored over 250 papers in reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Prof. Hermansky holds a Doctor of Engineering degree from the University of Tokyo, and Diplom-Ingenieur degree from Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.

Dr. Daniel Povey – Johns Hopkins University 
Dr. Daniel Povey completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 2003. After spending just under ten years working for industry research labs (IBM Research and then Microsoft Research), Dr. Povey joined Johns Hopkins University in 2012. His thesis work introduced several practical innovations for discriminative training of models for speech recognition and made those techniques widely popular. At IBM Research, Dr. Povey introduced feature-space discriminative training, which has become a common feature of state-of-the art systems. At Microsoft Research, and then at Johns Hopkins University, he has been creating a speech recognition toolkit "Kaldi", which aims to make state-of-the-art speech recognition techniques widely accessible.

Prof. Barbara Grosz – Harvard University 
Prof. Barbara J. Grosz is the Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Her many seminal contributions to Artificial Intelligence (AI) include establishing the research field of computational modeling of discourse, developing some of the earliest computer dialogue systems, pioneering models of collaboration, and the development of collaborative multi-agent systems and collaborative systems for human-computer communication. Grosz is the recipient of the University of California, Berkeley Distinguished Alumna Award in Computer Sciences and Engineering (1997), the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2009), and the 2015 IJCAI Research Excellence Award.

Prof. Alexander Waibel – Carnegie Mellon University & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 
Dr. Alexander Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.  He is the director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT). The Center works internationally in a network of eight top research institutions. Its mission is to develop multimodal and multilingual human communication technologies that improve human-human and human-machine communication. 

Prof. Martha Palmer – University of Colorado 
Prof. Martha Palmer holds joint appointments in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Colorado. She also directed the International Linguistic Institute 2011 gathering. Prof. Palmer is an ACL Fellow. Her research has focused on capturing elements of the meanings of words that can comprise automatic representations of complex sentences and documents. She and her students produce linguistic annotations and are also engaged in training automatic annotators, funded by NSF, NIH and DARPA. Prof. Palmer is an editor of Linguistic Issues in Language Technology and has been on the Editorial Board of Computational Linguistics and a co-Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering.

Prof. Bonnie Webber – University of Edinburgh 
Prof. Bonnie Webber is Deputy Head of the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She works on Natural Language Processing, and contributes to the University's growing presence in Bioinformatics. Her current research interests include problems of terminology and text mining, as well as long-standing interests in question answering and anaphor resolution in discourse.

Prof. Mark Steedman – University of Edinburgh 
Prof. Mark Steedman has been Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh since 1998. His research interests cover issues in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science and cognitive science, including syntax and semantics of natural languages and programming languages, wide-coverage semantic parsing, comprehension of natural language discourse by humans and by machine, grammar-based language modeling, natural language generation, and intonation in spoken discourse. He holds a PhD is in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh.

Prof. James F. Allen – University of Rochester 
Dr. James Allen is Associate Director and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida. He has had a very distinguished research and teaching career at the University of Rochester where he retains a 50% appointment as the John H. Dessauer Professor of Computer Science. Dr. Allen's research interests span a range of issues covering natural language understanding, discourse, knowledge representation, common-sense reasoning and planning. While most of the NLP field has moved to statistical learning methods as the paradigm for language processing, Dr. Allen believes that deep language understanding can only currently be achieved by significant hand-engineering of semantically-rich formalisms coupled with statistical preferences.

Prof. Henry Kautz – University of Rochester 
Prof. Henry Kautz is the Robin & Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. He has served as department head at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ and as a full professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2010, Prof. Kautz was elected president of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). His research in artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, and healthcare applications has led him to be honored as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Fellow of the AAAI.

About VoiceBox Technologies Corporation 
VoiceBox provides award-winning Contextual Voice Interface technology and Voice AI for the connected car, mobile, home and IoT markets, worldwide. The Company shares several CES Best in Show honors with its partners.  Shipping in 23 languages across 3 continents, VoiceBox's flagship customers include Toyota and Samsung.  VoiceBox can also be found on Fiat, Dodge, Chrysler, Maserati, Mercedes, Smart Car, Renault, Mazda, Subaru, Pioneer and Tom-Tom.  Headquartered in Bellevue, WA, the Company has offices in Los Angeles, Munich, the Netherlands, France and Tokyo. Find more information at http://www.voicebox.com.

SOURCE VoiceBox Technologies Corporation

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