Dr. Alexander Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Germany. He directs InterACT, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies at both Universities with research emphasis in speech recognition, language processing, speech translation, multimodal and perceptual user interfaces. At Carnegie Mellon, he also serves as Associate Director of the Language Technologies Institute and holds joint appointments in the Human Computer Interaction Institute and the Computer Science Department.

Dr. Waibel was one of the founders of C-STAR, the international consortium for speech translation research and served as its chairman from 1998-2000. His team has developed the JANUS speech translation system, the first American and European Speech Translation system, and more recently the first real-time simultaneous speech translation system for lectures. His lab has also developed a number of multimodal systems including perceptual Meeting Rooms, Meeting recognizers, Meeting Browser and multimodal dialog systems for humanoid robots. He directed the CHIL program ( FP-6 Integrated Project on multimodality) in Europe and the NSF-ITR project STR-DUST (the first domain independent speech translation project) in the US. In the areas of speech, speech translation, and multimodal interfaces Dr. Waibel holds several patents and has founded and co-founded several successful commercial ventures.

Dr. Waibel received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 and 1986. His work on the Time Delay Neural Networks was awarded the IEEE best paper award in 1990. His contributions to multilingual and speech translation systems was awarded the "Alcatel SEL Research Prize for Technical Communication" in 1994, the "Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence" from CMU in 2002, and the Speech Communication Best Paper Award in 2002.