Alexander I. Rudnicky

Greetings, I'm a Research Professor at the Computer Science Department in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm a part of the Carnegie Mellon Speech Group, one of the oldest such groups in the country, founded by Raj Reddy. I'm also the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Speech Consortium, a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and industry. I have a faculty affiliation with the Language Technologies Institute and, actually, most of my students are based there.

Over time my research interests have revolved around speech perception and recognition, speech interfaces, dialog systems and language in general. I've headed the SpeechWear project that produced an early mobile speech system; I'm still interested in the topic of mobile speech. I also headed the Communicator project, which dealt with dialog system architectures. Olympus, a successor system, is available in Open Source. The Ravenclaw dialog manager came out of the Communicator work and is the current foundation for many of the systems that we create. RavenClaw incorporates dialog management ideas that were first introduced in the Office Manager (OM) system and further developed in successor systems, including Scheduler and AGENDA. Papers listed on the publications describe this work.

In 1996 I implemented a set of web-based tools that are used to generate a knowledge base for the open source Sphinx recognition system, including a language model and a pronouncing dictionary. It's proved to be quite popular, and I've continued to maintain the tool and expand its capabilities. Do try it out if you are building a recognition system (the model formats work for any ARPA-compliant system) .

My current interests centre on language-based communication in teams of humans and robots and on aspects of core speech recognition. I am also interested in approaches to learning based on implicit supervision in two domains: automatic improvement of speech system knowledge through dialog and learning-based report generation. I have a a reasonably up-to-date list of my publications that you can peruse for more information.

Or maybe you'd like to know more about me by reading either a short or a long biography. I like to consider myself up on all this web-based networking stuff, so you'll be able to find me at LinkedIn and on Plaxo; these sites will have somewhat different information about me.

I'm involved in several organizations focused on spoken language interaction (SIGdial) and speech interfaces (AVIOS) that you might want to check out.

Something new: videos from our group.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that the photograph at the upper left corner of this page is wildly out of date. On the other hand it's not hard to imagine my current appearance... less hair, more grey. I think I still have that shirt in my closet (unless my son stole it; he does that now and then). I gave the sweater away to a good friend who seemed to covet it. Note that I first put this home page together a long time ago; at this point I kind of like its retro dawn-of-the-web look. (Although strictly speaking it's a redesign of my very-first page, and follows then-current notions of proper web design. Yes, the world really has changed that much.) If you're still reading this then you might want to click on my picture which will lead you to more early-web foolishness.

If you need to reach be, E-mail is usually a good bet, particularly when I'm away on travel, since I do check my mail regularly.