Introduction

Since the beginning, my professional activity has been linked to teaching and research, moving between the academy and the industry, generally in topics related to Linguistics and Speech Technologies.

In the research area, my activity has always been moving between basic and applied research, oriented basically to two lines: the theoretical description of the prosodic phenomena of Spanish, and to a lesser extent to Catalan, from a phonetic perspective; and the application of linguistic knowledge, specially phonetic, to the development of speech technology, with a special emphasis on text-to-speech systems. The alternation of periods at the academia (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra University, Universitat de Barcelona) and at R+D companies (Ciència i Tecnologia Aplicada,Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Barcelona Media) has allowed me to combine more theoretical research (basically ath te university) and the participation in the development of many of the main commercial text-to-speech and speech recognition systems (Loquendo, France Telecom, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Cereproc), using in many cases the knowledge generated in my theoretical research to their development.

As far as my teaching activity is concerned, apart from a short period at secondary school in a private centre in Barcelona (1988-1990) and some activities as a volunteer teacher of Spanish as foreign language in an school for adults, also in Barcelona, my teaching activity has been basically linked to the university (Autónoma de Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra , CSIC/UIMP, UNED, Universitat de Barcelona, Blanquerna-URL), in the fields of General and Spanish Linguistics and Speech Technologies.