Shinji Watanabe, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, has been named a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) "for wide-ranging, fundamental contributions to research and leadership in speech recognition technologies."

Founded in 2007, the ISCA Fellows Program recognizes and honors outstanding ISCA members who have made significant contributions to the science and technology of speech communication. Fellows are nominated by association members and selected by a committee of their peers. Since its inception, the program has recognized nearly 100 fellows from countries around the globe.

Watanabe, who is part of CMU's Language Technologies Institute, studies automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, spoken language understanding, and machine learning for speech and language processing. Last fall, he earned an Amazon Research Award for his work to improve non-autoregressive end-to-end speech recognition with pretrained acoustic and language models, and was named an IEEE fellow for his contributions to speech recognition technology.  He is also part of a team that hopes to expand the number of languages with automatic speech recognition tools available to them from around 200 to potentially 2,000 by developing models that use shared phones instead of the traditional phonemes. 

Watanabe earned his bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees from Waseda University in Tokyo, and was a research scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan from 2001 to 2011. Before joining the CMU faculty in 2021, he served as a visiting scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a senior principal research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Boston and an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University. He has published more than 300 papers and received several awards, including a best paper award from the IEEE ASRU in 2019. He is a senior area editor of IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing and has been active on numerous technical committees.

The ISCA will recognize the new fellows this August at its annual Interspeech conference in Dublin.

For more information, visit the ISCA website.