Philips J. Res. 49 (1995) 489-494

AUTHORS' BIOGRAPHIESXavier Aubert received in 1977 the degree of engineer in applied mathe-matics from the University of Louvain, Louvain, Belgium, and receiveda PhD in 1983 in the field of numerical simulation of free surface flows,at the same university. In 1985 he became Research Scientist at the Phi-lips Research Laboratory, Brussels, where his activities have been essen-tially concerned with hidden Markov modelling applied to continuousspeech recognition. In July 1991 he joined the Philips Research Labora-tories in Aachen, Germany, where he is now working on large-vocabularycontinuous speech recognition. His current interests include acousticmodelling and search algorithms.

HaraId Aust, age 30, holds a Diplom-Informatiker degree (Master'sdegree in computer science) from Kaiserslautern University. He wrotehis thesis at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence(DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, where he also worked as assistant in the fieldof document analysis. At the end of his studies, he spent a year with Kar-sten Manufacturing Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, where he gainedexperience in commercial software development.

Haraid Aust joined the Speech Recognition Group of the PhilipsResearch Laboratories in Aachen in 1992. He has developed the speechunderstanding and dialogue control technology employed in our auto-matic inquiry systems. Since 1995, he has been with Philips Dialogue Sys-tems where he works in the position of Development Manager.

Stefan Besting studied computer science at the University of Dortmund,Germany, specializing in theoretical computer science and complexitytheory, and receiving his Dipl.-Inf degree in 1992. Since 1993 he hasbeen a research staff member at the Philips Research Laboratories,Aachen, Germany, where he works on automatic phonetic transcriptionand language modelling for large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Peter Beyerlein was born in Berlin, German Demoeratic Republic, in1968. He studied information techniques in Dresden, Moscow(U.S.S.R.) and Stuttgart and received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1992. Since1992 he has worked on automatic speech recognition at the PhilipsResearch Laboratories in Aachen. His primary interest is in acousticmodelling and search strategies for large-vocabulary and small-vocabu-lary continuous-speech recognition.

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Authors' biographies

R.P.G. Collier: Ph.D in Linguistics, University of Leuven (Belgium), 1972; Belgian NationalScience Foundation, 1969-1975; Postdoctoral fellowship at Haskins Laboratories, Yale Univer-sity (New Haven, CT, USA), 1973-1974; Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics, University ofAntwerp (Belgium), 1975-1988; Institute for Perception Research, 1988-present, as head of the'Hearing and Speech' group; part-time professor of Experimental Linguistics in the EindhovenUniversity of Technology, 1989-present. He is (co-)author of some 50 papers on various aspectsof speech production and perception and of the monograph 'A perceptural study of intonation',Cambridge University Press, 1990. His research interests include the study of prosodic vari-ables and their communicative relevance, and the application of phonetic knowledge in speechtechnology.

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Christian Dugast was born in Fianarantsoa (Madagascar) in 1960. Hereceived the Diplome degree in computer science, the PhD degree(Doctorat de 3ème cycle) in computer science from the University ofToulouse (France) in 1983 and 1987 respectively. His PhD work con-cerned search algorithms for continuous speech recognition.

From 1987 to 1989 he was a Knowledge Engineer involved in thedesign of an expert system in chemistry for BASF. He joined PhilipsResearch Laboratories in Germany as Research Scientist in 1989 towork on continuous speech recognition. His main research interests areneural network and continuous hidden Markov acoustic-phonetic mod-elling. He is now responsible for research activities related to interna-tional benchmarking and multi-linguality.

During his study at the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (France),he received the Toulouse Prize for his Diplome degree and a Researchand Industry Ministry grant for his PhD. He was work-package man-ager of the 'Continuous Speech Recognition' work-package withinthe Esprit Polyglot project. In 1994 he joined the group of expertsadvising the European Commission on project funding for LanguageEngineering.

Ute Essen studied Mathematics at the Technical University in Aachen.She joined the Speech Recognition Group of the Philips ResearchLabora tories in Aachen in 1990. Her main research topics were languagemodelling and acoustic-phonetic modelling. Since 1994 she has beenworking on speech products at the development department of PhilipsDictation Systems in Vienna.

Stephan Gamm was born in 1967 and received the Dipl.-Ing. degree fromRWTH Aachen (Aachen University of Technology), Germany. In 1992hejoined thePhilips Research Laboratories. Afterengaging in the humanfactors of telecommunication terminals he joined the speech recognitiongroup in 1994 and is there responsible for the usability engineering ofvoice controls in various consumer electronics.

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Authors' biographies

Dieter Geiler was born on 30 July 1959. He studied communications atRWTH AachenjGermany with the degree of Diplom-Ing. in 1985. Hisfirst work was on pre-development in the area of speech coding andecho-cancellation. He joined Philips in 1990, where he has worked onresearch for speech recognition and its implementation on DSPs.

Reinhold Haeb-Umbach received the Dipl.-I ng. and Dr.-Ing. degrees fromRWTH Aachen (Aachen University of Technology), Germany, in 1983and 1988, respectively. From 1983 to 1988 he was with the Lehrstuhlfür Elektrische Regelungstechnik, Aachen University of Technology,working on digital receiver design. From 1988 to 1989 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA,where he worked on coding and signal processing for recording channels.Since 1990 he has been a research staff member of the speech recognitiongroup at the Philips Research Laboratories, Aachen, Germany, wherehe is engaged in work on both small- and large-vocabulary speechrecognition.

Eric Kathman graduated with an Electronic Engineering degree from theTechnische Hogeschool, Rijswijk, The Netherlands, in 1988. In 1987, heworked as a graduate trainee at Colt Technologies in Kansas City, Kan-sas, USA and, in 1988, at Philips Telecommunication and Data Systems,Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. In 1989, he joined Philips Research Labs inEindhoven, The Netherlands. Since then, he has been working on thedesign and implementation of speech coding algorithms. Currently, heis a member of the Digital Signal Processing group and his research inter-ests include speech coding, software design, digital signal processing andhardware implementation.

Reinhard Kneser received the Diploma degree in mathematics from theUniversity of Bonn, Germany, in 1984. Until 1990 he was developingimage processing software at Computer Graphic Systems, Hamburg,Germany. In 1990 he joined the Speech Recognition group at the PhilipsResearch Laboratories, Aachen, Germany, where he is currently workingon language modelling.

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Authors' biographies

S.P.J. Landsbergen: Ir. degree (Mathematics), Delft University of Technology 1970; Philips-Elec-trologica, Apeldoorn, 1971-1972; Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, 1972-1992; Insti-tute for Perception Research (IPO), I992-present. Head of group 'Computational Linguistics',1987-1992. Head ofIPO group 'Language', 1992-present. Part-time professor in Language Tech-nology at the University of Utrecht, 1988-present. He is one of the authors of the book M.T.Rosetta et al., Compositional Translation, Kluwer Ac. Publishers, 1994. His research interestsinclude various aspects oflanguage technology, in particular question answering, machine translationand language generation.

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Hans-Günter Meier was born in Germany on 16 February 1959. Hereceived his Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering at the Fach-hochschule Aachen in 1980 and his Dipl.-Math. degree in mathematicsat the RWTH Aachen in 1986.

From 1986 to 1991 he worked in the field of Dynamical Systems at theRWTH Aachen where he received his PhD in mathematics in 1991. Since1991 he has worked at Philips Research Laboratories in Aachen, focusinghis research interests on the field of statistical language modelling. Hc is

-:. currently responsible for the research activities in continuous speechrecognition for large-vocabulary systems within Philips.

Hermann Ney was born in Saarlouis, Germany, in 1952. He received theDiplom degree in physics from the University of Goettingen, Germany,in 1977 and the Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the TUBraunschweig (University of Technology), Germany, in 1982.

In 1977, he joined Philips Research Laboratories, first Hamburg, thenAachen, Germany, where he worked on various aspects of speaker veri-fication, isolated and connected word recognition and large-vocabularycontinuous-speech recognition. In 1985, he was appointed head of theSpeech and Pattern Recognition group. In 1988-1989 he was a visitingscientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. In July 1993, hejoined the RWTH Aachen (University of Technology), Germany, as aprofessor of computer science.

His work has concentrated on the application of dynamic program-ming and statistical techniques for decision-making in context. His cur-rent interests cover all aspects of pattern and speech recognition, suchas signal processing, search strategies, language modelling and automaticlearning.

Martin Oerder received his Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees from AachenUniversity of Technology in 1984 and 1989. From 1984 until 1990 he wasresearch assistant and group leader at Aachen University of Technology,working in the field of digital communications.

In 1990, he joined Philips Research Laboratories in Aachen and startedworking on Automatic Speech Recognition. He initiated and led the pro-ject 'Automatic Inquiry Systems'. Since 1995 he has been business unitmanager of Philips Dialogue Systems, Aachen.

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Authors' biographies

Frank Seide was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1968. He received hisDipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from Hamburg-Harburg Uni-versity of Technology in 1993.

He joined the Philips speech recognition group in September 1993. Hehas been working on the AIS (automatic inquiry systems) project sincethen. His interests are acoustic modelling and algorithmic optimizationswith respect to inquiry system specific issues, such as realtime onlineoperation and speech understanding.

Rob J. Sluijter was born in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on 12 July 1946.In 1968, he graduated in electronic engineering from the Eindhoven Insti-tuut voor Hoger Beroepsonderwijs. In 1962, he joined Philips ResearchLaboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Over the years, he hasbeen involved in various research programmes in the areas of data trans-mission, digital signal processing, speech analysis and synthesis, digitalcoding of speech with applications to HF radio and mobile telephony,digital processing of video signals and wireless transmission of digitalaudio signals, covering theoretical aspects, applications and VLSI realiz-ations. Currently, he is a Research Fellow in the Digital Signal ProcessingGroup engaged in source coding of speech and audio signals. Since 1989he has been a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Volker Steinbiss was born in Rheydt, Germany, in 1957. He studiedmathematics in Goettingen and Nice, France, with a specialization incomplex analysis, and received the Dipl.-Math. and Dr. rer. nat. degreesin 1983 and 1985, respectively. Since 1986 he has worked on automaticspeech recognition at the Philips Research Laboratories in Hamburgand Aachen. His primary interest is in search techniques He was incharge of the Philips large-vocabulary (German) dictation research pro-ject. Since 1994 he has been head of the speech recognition research group.

Rakesh Taori was born in Pachmarhi, India, on 6 April 1970. He receivedthe BEng degree with highest honour (the Engineering Medal) and theMPhil degree from the University of Westminster, London, in 1990and 1993, respectively. In 1990, he received the London Section Prizefor being adjudged the best control engineer in London. Since August1992 he has been working at Philips Research Labs, Eindhoven, in thearea of speech coding. His main research interests include speech codingand applied digital signal processing.

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Bacb-Hiep Tran was born on 14 June 1956 in Saigon, Vietnam. Hereceived the Diplom-Ingenieur degree in electrical engineering fromHannover Tecbnical University, Germany, in 1989. In 1989 he joinedPhilips Research Laboratories, where he works on acoustic modellingand search strategies for large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition.

Friedbelm Wuppermann was born in Juelich, Germany, in 1964. Hereceived his degree of Dipl.-Ing. in electrical engineering from theRWTH Aachen (University of Technology) in 1990. Since 1990 he hasbeen with Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands,working on wideband speech coding.

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