This April at ICASSP, Alejandro (Alex) Acero will receive the Society Award from IEEE Signal Processing Society for "contributions to speech technology and leadership in the signal processing community." The Society Award is the highest honor awarded by the Signal Processing Society, and it honors members who have demonstrated both outstanding technical contributions in the signal processing field and outstanding leadership to the society.
Alex has been a major contributor to the development of speech technology, during a period where spoken computer interaction has progressed from controlled lab demos to pervasive commercial use in mobile and cloud-based services. He has made substantial contributions to a variety of core speech technologies used in numerous products, starting from early commercial systems based on hidden Markov models to the latest deep neural network (DNN) developments. Dr. Acero’s impressive contributions at Microsoft and Apple (including 155 US patents) are matched by a high impact publication record, with more than 250 papers, a co-authored textbook used in classes around the world, and over 20000 citations on Google Scholar.
In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Dr. Acero will be presenting the Norbert Wiener Lecture at ICASSP. His talk is entitled "The Deep Learning Revolution."