Dr. David Nahamoo

A world-class technician, having developed algorithms that contributed to IBM?s leadership in speech recognition, some of which resulted in the company?s highly successful deployment of ViaVoice, he is the Speech Chief Technology Officer at IBM Research. His research in the areas of acoustic modeling, training, and resource-optimized implementations has been at the core of IBM?s Automatic Speech Recognition engines for years. He received a B.S. degree from Tehran University, Iran in 1975, an M.S. degree from Imperial College of London, England in 1976, and his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1982; all in Electrical Engineering. Over the last 25 years, he has championed worldwide efforts to realize spoken language as the inevitable mode of interaction with digital systems. He is responsible for IBM Research technical and business strategy directions for speech technologies. He provides technical direction for Conversational and Multimodal Interaction Technologies as well Speech-To-Text and Speaker Verification Technologies at IBM Research Labs worldwide. He joined IBM in 1982 as a Research Staff Member. Since then, he has held a number of positions in the organization including Manager, Speech Recognition Modeling and Interim General Manager, Speech Business Unit. In 1993, he was appointed Senior Manager of the Human Language Technologies Group, of which he became the Department Group Manager in 1998. From 1993 to 2006, he was responsible for delivering speech technologies to IBM Divisions for desktop, embedded, and server-based speech products. During these years, he managed a team of 60 scientists at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York and a team of 20 researchers and developers in Prague. He was appointed an IBM Fellow in May of 2008 and holds more than 40 patents.