contact information

NYU-Courant Computer Science and Center for Data Science

60 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10011

michael.picheny at nyu dot edu  Rm. 524

links

Professional Associations

Professional Associations:  IEEE Signal Processing Society   |  International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) 

Michael Picheny joined NYU as a Research Professor in August 2019 after a long career at IBM Research.   Michael has worked in the Speech Recognition area since 1981, joining IBM after finishing his doctorate at MIT. He has been 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 recenty 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. He has received several awards from IBM for his work, including a corporate award, three outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and two Research Division Awards. He is the co-holder of over 50 patents and was named a Master Inventor by IBM in 1995 and again in 2000. Michael served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing from 1986-1989, was the chairman of the Speech Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society from 2002-2004, and is a Fellow of the IEEE. He served multiple times as an Adjunct Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department of Columbia University and co-taught a course in speech recognition. He was a member of the board of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) from 2005-2013 and named an ISCA Fellow in 2014. He was the co-general chair of the IEEE ASRU 2011 Workshop in Hawaii. He was  a Distinguished Industry Speaker of the Signal Processing Society of the IEEE (2018-2019). 

Prior to joining NYU, Michael had been a manager for 35 years in the Speech area at IBM, and led the Speech team in Yorktown Heights since 2007. At NYU, Michael continues his research in speech recognition  including work on  transcription of accented speech,  spoken interactions bewteen parents and young children, and transcription from audio and video data as part of the DARPA-funded  Computational Cultural Understanding Program.