Prof. Abeer Alwan received her Ph.D. in EECS from MIT in 1992. Since then, she has been with the ECE department at UCLA where she is a Distinguished Professor, established the Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory, and has served as Vice Chair for the ECE Undergraduate and Graduate affairs. Dr. Alwan is a recipient of several awards including: NSF Research Initiation, NIH FIRST, UCLA-TRW Excellence in Teaching, Okawa Foundation Award in Telecommunication, and Engineer’s Council Educator Award. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Distinguished Lecturer for ISCA, co-Editor in Chief of Speech Communication, Chair of the IEEE Flanagan Committee, Vice Chair of the IEEE Awards committee, and an elected member of the Board of Governers of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. 

Dr. Richard Cave is a Speech and Language Therapist and co-Director of the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion (CDLI) at University College London’s Global Disability Innovation (GDI) Hub. CDLI develops and implements AI personalised speech recognition technology for people living with changed speech (due to ALS/MND, Head and  Neck Cancer, Parkinson's Disease amongst many other conditions) - we have built these models for speakers of local languages in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda as well as English, Spanish and soon German, Italian and French. His PhD focused on the lived experience of people living with speech change due to ALS/MND when using Google's Project Relate - personalised speech recognition technology and how it may or may not help them to be better understood in everyday conversation. Richard worked with the MND Association for eight years focusing voice banking support/training, and at Assistive Technology Hubs, Hospital inpatient Stroke and Rehab wards and neurological care homes. He is a national advisor to RCSLT for MND and voice banking. Between 2019-2024 Richard was a consultant to Google Research. He is currently a consultant to the ElevenLabs Impact Program.