Phil Shinn's Resume

Summary

Software architect and speech scientist with over twenty years of experience in new product development and project management. Has expertise in financial services, linguistics, biometrics, human factors, IVR & text chatbot design and natural language processing:

• Programming: Python, Java, C, C++, VB, LISP

• Voice & Chatbot User Interface Design

• Strategic planning, project estimation, project plan development

• VXML application and grammar development

• Custom recognition and TTS lexicon development

• Speech & text application usability assessment

• RFI & RFP response authoring, SOW authoring

• Patent development

Employment

IVR Design Group: New York, NY, 12/17-Current. Principal. Consulting on design and development of speech, text and multi-modal applications for clients including Apple, IBM/TD, Great Healthworks, PTP, FirstBank, Coke, Western Union and Fedex.

ImmunityHealth: New York, NY, 1/18-1/22. NLP Consultant. Use CRM, NLP and ML on medical records to automate patient matching to clinical trials.

Voxgen (Waterfield): New York, NY, 10/16-12/17. Senior Voice User Experience Consultant. Designed IVR, voice and text user experiences, clients included Allstate, Nike, XPO, Lime, Game, Home Depot, Hawaiian Telecom; Assisted with client management for user experience design projects; Assisted with Speech Science, including grammar development and performance tuning; Assisted with Chat Bot development.

Speechpro: New York, NY, 1/16-10/16. Chief Technology Officer. Voice biometrics, multi-channel recording, speech analytics, audio enhancement, ASR, TTS; Oversaw customization and localization of products for the US market.

Cyara: New York, NY, 3/15-1/16. Senior Technical Consultant. Worked with clients to understand and gather business and technical requirements; provided consultancy on test strategies, methodologies and best practices within the contact center domain; worked with project and technical personnel to implement, deploy and deliver solutions; ran training sessions, product demonstrations, workshops and webinars; provided support for client queries; developed strong customer relationships; pre-sales support.

MorganStanley: New York, NY, 5/10-3/15. Contact Center Engineering, UI Designer & Speech Scientist. Design and build new IVR and call center infrastructure for the merger of Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney. Roles: principal UI designer for IVR managing call flows, prompts, grammar development and speech science; Business analyst develop new features; day-to-day performance testing and escalations; analysis and research of new technologies such as biometrics and chatbot virtual agents. Redesigned ID&V process resulted in increased containment rate of 30%, savings more than $1M per year, improved user experience.

IVR Design Group: New York, NY, 10/09-05/10. Principal. Design and development of speech, text and multi-modal applications.

Genesys: Daly City, CA, 4/04-10/09. Principal Consultant, UI Design & Speech Science. Performed pre-sales and post-sales technical consulting and design and development of speech applications.

Bank of America (Countrywide): Calabasas, CA, 1/04-3/05. VP Application Development. Designed self-service voice applications for mortgage insurance servicing, human resources call routing, privacy preferences setting, credit card activation and pay plan enrollment.

HeyAnita: Los Angeles, CA, 3/01-1/04. Director of Design & Speech Science. Managed team of linguists, created voice portals for Sprint-PCS, Verizon Wireless and Vodaphone. Developed requirements, call flows, grammars and dictionaries, testing and system tuning.

Hughes Research Labs: Malibu, CA, 9/00-3/01. Technical Consultant, Speech Understanding. Developed voice-activated applications, including telematics for GM and air traffic control for Raytheon.

Text Analysis International: Laguna Beach, CA, 8/99-3/01. Worked on IDE for text analysis applications. Indicast (Oracle): Del Mar, CA, 9/99-1/00. Voice user interface designer. Patented interface.

Unisys: Malvern PA, 1/98-1/00. Technical Consultant. Performed technical pre- and post-sales support for Natural Language Speech Assistant.

Echobuzz: Irvine, CA, 1/98-8/99. Vice President, R&D. Developed voice activated voice mail.

Citigroup: Advanced Development Group: Los Angeles, CA 90-98. Systems Architect 96; Computer Scientist 95; Principal, Technical Staff 92; Technical Staff 90. Developed biometrics lab, patented biometrics implementation on smartcards; Built patented multilingual IVR system; Analyzed & deployed NLP and translation technologies; Implemented ASR systems for consumer and corporate financial services, including auto-attendants & phone banking; Implemented voice input & output for FX trading; Assesse and selected vendors of telecom technologies for trading floors; Designed SEI CMM SDM for R&D.

LSI: Woodland Hills, CA, 90-95, 99. Speech Consultant. Developed speech-to-speech translation system for military intelligence.

Speech Systems: Tarzana, CA 84-89. Director, Contract Research 86; Technical Staff 84. Coded acoustic phonetic features, dictionaries, grammars and tools; Wrote proposals for and managed activity on government and privately sponsored contract R&D, including programs for Citibank, DARPA, DOD, FAA, NASA, DOE, & DOT.

Language Systems: Providence, RI, 83-84. Application Developer. Worked on a grammar checker for word processing developed by Henry Kucera. Code licensed to Houghton Mifflin and delivered in Microsoft Word.

Brown University: Providence, RI, 81-83. Research Assistant Speech Lab. The lab examined the cognitive and neural bases of language.

Education

Ph.D., Linguistics, Brown University. 

B.A., International Relations & History, Brown University.

Patents

• US5794218: Automated multilingual interactive system.

• US5806050: Electronic transaction terminal for vocalization of transactional data.

• US6529586: System for secure telephonic transmission of audio data.

• US6655585: System and method of biometric smart card user authentication.

• US7376622: System for automated debiting and settling of financial transactions

Selected Publications & Presentations

• “The Impact of Voice Talent Persona Selection on Intelligibility for the Elderly,” SpeechTek, New York, 8/2009

• “View From AVIOS: The Dilemma of AI Transparency”, Speech Technology, Feb. 7, 2020, p. 6.

• “Who Are You?” in Ubiquitous Voice, Falkson, L. Ed., Independent Pubs, 2018, pp. 74-79.

• “Ten Criteria for Measuring Effective Voice User Interfaces,” with J. Larson et al., Speech Technology, 12/2005 “Designing Language Models for Voice Portal Applications,” with M. Shomphe,et al., International Journal of Speech Technology, Kluwer Academic, Vol. 7, pp 93-99, 2004.

• “Methods for the Identification of Evoked Response Components in the Frequency and combined Time/Frequency Domains”, with A. M. Norcia et al., Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1986, 65, pp. 212-226.

• “Limitations on Context-Conditioned Effects in the Perception of [b] and [w],” with S. E. Blumstein and A. Jongman, Perception and Psychophysics, 1985, 38(5), pp. 397-407.

• “On the Role of the Amplitude Envelope for the Perception of [b] and [w],” with S. E. Blumstein, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1984, Vol. 75, No. 4, pp. 1243-1252.

• “Phonetic Disintegration in Aphasia: Acoustic Analysis of Spectral Characteristics for Place of Articulation,” with S. E. Blumstein, Brain and Language, 1983, Vol. 20, pp. 90-114.

• “A Continuous Speech Recognizer Using Two-Stage Encoder Neural Nets,” with W.S. Meisel, et al., Proc Int. Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Washington DC, pp 306-306, 1/1990

• “Phoneme-based, Speaker Independent, Continuous Speech Recognition,” Presentation at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Conference, Minneapolis, 8/1988.

• A Cross-language Investigation of the Stop, Affricate and Fricative Manners of Articulation, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984