Michael Picheny's NYU Home Page

Michael has worked in the Speech Recognition area since 1981, joining IBM after finishing his doctorate at MIT. He was heavily involved in the development of almost all of IBM's recognition systems, ranging from the world's first real-time large vocabulary discrete system in 1984 through IBM's product lines for telephony and embedded systems in the 1990s, and most recently was responsible for putting out a set of Speech Services for both Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis during his tenure in IBM's Watson Group. He has published numerous papers in both journals and conferences on almost all aspects of speech recognition (see web page for details). He is the co-holder of over 50 patents and was named a Master Inventor by IBM in 1995 and again in 2000. In addition to professional volunteer service (as indicated below), he served multiple times as an Adjunct Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department of Columbia University and co-taught a course in speech recognition. Michael is a Fellow of both the IEEE and of ISCA. 

Michael was a manager for 35 years in the Speech area at IBM, and led the Speech team in Yorktown Heights since 2007. He  retired from IBM in 2019 and joined NYU-Courant Computer Science and the Center for Data Science as a part-time Research Professor. At NYU,  he has worked on problems involving extending earlier work on the MALACH corpus and accented speech in general, recognition and diarization of adult-infant conversations, end to end speech understanding, untangling text and speech representations, and most recently, on improving recognition of multilingual speech for cross-cultural applications. Michael also acts as a senior adviser to the Global AI Frontier Lab,  a collaboration  of the Republic of Korea with NYU,  to address AI challenges and advance global research for the benefit of humanity.