CSAIL Introduction and Recent Research on Spoken Language Technology

Prof. Victor Zue

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory？

Biography

Victor Zue received his ScD from MIT in 1976, and has been at MIT ever since. He is the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In the early part of his career, Victor conducted research in acoustic-phonetic and phonological analyses of American English. Subsequently, his research interest shifted to the development of spoken language interfaces to make human-computer interactions easier and more natural. Between 1989 and 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, which has pioneered the development of many systems that enable a user to interact with computers using spoken language.

Outside of MIT, Victor has served on many planning, advisory, and review committees for the U.S. federal government and for many multinational corporations. From 1996-1998, he chaired the Information Science and Technology Study Group for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, helping the DoD formulate new directions for information technology research. In 1999, he received the DARPA Sustained Excellence Award. Victor is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He is also an Academician of Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Abstract

This talk has two parts. The first part will be a brief introduction of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It is my attempt at encouraging Tsinghua students to consider a graduate career at MIT, and I would be happy to answer any and all questions concerning graduate admission. The second part of the talk will give an update on our research concerning spoken language technology. Specifically, I will describe two projects — mobile information access and second language learning. Video demonstrations will be included.

Time: 10:00 am on Wednesday Nov. 5th, 2008

Place: Room 1-315, FIT building, Tsinghua University

Organizer: Research Institute of Information Technology（RIIT）, Tsinghua University.