Julia Hirschberg, our past president, is being honored by IEEE with the 2011 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional association.

 The award, sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, recognizes Hirschberg for pioneering contributions to speech synthesis and prosody research. The award will be presented on 24 May 2011 at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Prague, Czech Republic.

Julia has been a pioneer and leading innovator in building viable computational models of human prosody for use in speech synthesis.In addition to her research for improving prosody in speech synthesis, she  recently worked on  the detection of  emotional aspects in speech with applications in automated call centers where a computer can recognize if callers are angry and pass them to a human operator. Julia is one of the architects of the Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) system for the labeling of human prosodic contours that is used in text-to-speech systems and is widely used in prosody research. Initially used for intonational description of standard American English, ToBI has been extended to model other languages.

After her graduation  in electrical engineering and a doctorate in computer science at the University of Philadelphia, Julia began working in James Flanagan’s laboratory at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, N.J., and created the Human-Computer Interface Research Department at Bell Labs, which moved subsequently to AT&T Labs.  She is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, New York, N.Y.

Congratulations Julia!