Joseph Tepperman received his PhD in 2009 from the University of Southern California, where he studied speech engineering with Professor Shrikanth Narayanan. Since then, he has worked as a Speech Researcher for Rosetta Stone Labs in Boulder, CO. He has published over twenty-five research papers, filed two patents, and created four speech-based art installations for the annual Soundwalk festival in Long Beach, CA. His phonetic opera libretto, Tongues Bloody Tongues, debuted to three sold-out performances at REDCAT in Los Angeles in July 2010, in collaboration with guerrilla orchestra Killsonic. He is the recipient of the Durfee Foundation’s Artists’ Resource for Completion grant, and a grant from the International Speech Communication Association. He has previously taught speech recognition to graduate-level engineers at USC and to multimedia artists at Machine Project, a Los Angeles community space.
Bryan Pellom has been an active researcher in the speech technology field for over 15 years. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University (Durham, NC) in 1996 and 1998 respectively. He joined the University of Colorado’s Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) in 1999. While at CU, his research focused on large vocabulary multilingual speech recognition, spoken dialog systems, and interactive speech technologies for children. In 2002 he was the technical chair of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) and in 2004 he was a visiting Fulbright lecturer at the Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland). Dr. Pellom is the author of over 50 publications in the speech technology field and co-inventor of SONIC, a state-of-the-art large vocabulary speech recognition platform. In 2006 he co-founded the Boulder, Colorado R&D office of Rosetta Stone where he currently serves as Vice President of Speech Development.
Kadri Hacioglu received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1990. His dissertation work was on novel speech signal representations and processing methods for transmitting speech signals over digital communication networks at very low bit rates. After his two-year military service, in 1992, he joined the faculty of Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU), Magosa, North Cyprus, as an Assistant Professor, and became an Associate Professor in 1997. While he was at EMU, he taught several classes at both undergraduate and graduate levels on electronics, digital communications, speech processing and neural networks. During this time, he conducted research on applying fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms to signal processing and communications problems. He authored/coauthored numerous papers and supervised a dozen M.Sc./Ph.D. students. From 1998 to 2000, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science (CS), University of Colorado (CU), Boulder. At the CS department, he taught classes on neural networks and continued his research. Later, he joined the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at CU. His research interests were speech recognition, information extraction, semantic parsing and machine learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP). At CSLR, Dr. Hacioglu co-developed SONIC speech recognition engine and developed technologies for integrating discourse and semantic information for improved speech recognition in command and control as well as mixed initiative dialog applications. He also developed several NLP tools for text processing and participated in many government and academic speech recognition and NLP competitions with competitive systems. While he was at CSLR, he co-founded Audiolocity Inc, in 2005, and took its Chief Technology Officer role focusing on the development of a platform to unlock information in audio for efficient and effective indexing, searching and browsing using speech recognition and NLP technologies. Since April 2006, he has been with Rossetta Stone Inc, a leading worldwide provider of technology-based language learning solutions, co-managing its Boulder R&D Labs as a Vice President of Speech Research.