Alex Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He is the director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT), a center that now works in a network of eight international top research institutions. Its mission is to develop multimodal and multilingual human communication technologies that improve human-human and human-machine communication. Prof. Waibel's team developed and presented the first speech translation systems in Europe&USA (1990/1991 (ICASSP'91)), the first ever road sign translator, the world’s first simultaneous lecture translation system (2005), and Jibbigo, the world’s first speech translator on a phone (2009).
Dr. Waibel was a founder and served as chairmen of C-STAR, the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research in 1991. He directed and coordinated many research programs in speech, translation, multimodal interfaces and machine learning in the US, Europe and Asia. He served as director of EU-Bridge, a large scale European multi-site Integrated Project initiative aimed at developing speech translation services for Europe; and of CHIL one of the largest Integrated Project efforts on Multimodal smart spaces. He also served as co-director of IMMI, a joint venture between KIT, CNRS & RWTH and as principal investigator of several US and European research programs on machine learning, language portability and performance.
During his career, Waibel founded and grew 10 successful companies. The latest, Jibbigo, built and distributed commercially the world’s first speech-translator on a smart phone. Facebook acquired Jibbigo in 2013 and Dr. Waibel served as founding director of the Facebook Language Technology Group in 2013-14. Since 2007, Dr. Waibel and his team als developed and deployed language technologies in humanitarian and disaster relief missions to improve communication between healthcare workers and patients. His team also builds and supplies interpretation services for Universities and tools for the European Parliament.
Dr. Waibel is a Fellow of the IEEE and has received many awards for pioneering work on neural network learning, multimodal and multilingual speech communication and translation technology. He published extensively (700+ publications, >22,000 citations, h-index 76) in the field, and received many patents.
Waibel received his BS, MS and PhD degrees at MIT and CMU, respectively.
