Nancy F. Chen

Nancy F. Chen received her Ph.D. from MIT and Harvard in 2011. She worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on her Ph.D. research in multilingual speech processing. She is currently a fellow, senior principal scientist, group leader, and principal investigator at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and CFAR (Centre for Frontier AI Research), A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology, and Research), Singapore. She is leading research efforts in generative AI, conversational AI, natural language generation and machine learning with applications related to education, healthcare, journalism, and defense. Speech evaluation technology developed by her team is deployed at the Ministry of Education in Singapore to support home-based learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Chen also led a cross-continent team for low-resource spoken language processing, which was one of the top performers in the NIST Open Keyword Search Evaluations (2013-2016), funded by the IARPA Babel program.

Dr. Chen has received numerous awards, including 2023 IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer, EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award (2023), Singapore 100 Women in Tech (2021), Young Scientist Best Paper Award at MICCAI 2021, Best Paper Award at SIGDIAL 2021, the 2020 P&G Connect + Develop Open Innovation Award, the 2019 UNESCO L’Oréal Singapore For Women in Science National Fellowship, Best Paper at APSIPA ASC (2016), MOE Outstanding Mentor Award (2012), the IEEE Spoken Language Processing Grant (2011): Microsoft-sponsored Outstanding Paper Award at ICASSP, and the NIH (National Institute of Health) Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Award (2004-2008).

Dr. Chen has given international keynotes at natural language processing, machine learning, and speech technology venues, including 2023 International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG) and Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2023 Conference on Machine Learning (ACML), 2023 Workshop on Speech and Language Technology for Education (SLaTE), 2023 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing, 2023 Workshop on NLP for Medical Conversations @ IJCNLP (International Joint Conference on NLP).

Dr. Chen has been active in the international research community with the following services: program chair of IEEE CAI (Conference on AI), APSIPA Board of Governors (2024-2026),  program chair of ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations) 2023, elected board member of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) 2021-2025,  senior area chair of AACL (2022), area chairs of ACL and EMNLP (2021), an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2016-2018, 2019-2021), senior editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2023 - present),  senior area editor of Signal Processing Letters (2021-2023), associate editor (2020-2023) of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, associate editors of Neurocomputing (2020-2021), Computer Speech and Language (2021- present), IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2019-2021) and was the guest editor for the special issue of “End-to-End Speech and Language Processing” in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2017).

In addition to her academic endeavors, technology from her team has also resulted in spin-off companies such as nomopai to help engage customers with confidence and empathy. Dr. Chen has also consulted for various companies ranging from startups to multinational corporations in the areas of climate change (social impact startup normal), emotional intelligence (Cogito Health), EdTech (Novo Learning), speech recognition (Vlingo, acquired by Nuance), and defense and aerospace (BAE Systems).

Here is my CV.