SRI International researcher named Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association

SRI International, an independent nonprofit research and development institute, announced today that Dr. Elizabeth Shriberg, a senior researcher in SRI's Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory, has been named a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The award, recently announced at Interspeech 2009 in Brighton, England, recognizes significant contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. Shriberg was honored for her fundamental research contributions to computational modeling of disfluencies, prosody in speech understanding, and higher-level features in speaker recognition.

"It is an unexpected and great honor to be included among such distinguished researchers, and I thank the collaborators I've been so fortunate to work with at SRI and other institutions around the world," said Shriberg. "Our research aims to harness information that people use in natural communication, including intonation and timing, to help computers recognize speakers and understand what they are saying. The long term goal is to advance scientific understanding of spontaneous speech, and to improve speech technology."

To qualify for the ISCA Fellow Award, candidates must be an ISCA member for five years or more, with a minimum of 10 years' experience in the field. A Fellow may be recognized for their outstanding technical contributions and/or for continued significant service to ISCA, and is selected by the ISCA Fellow Selection Committee. Shriberg was one of six researchers to be honored this year.

In addition to her role at SRI, Shriberg is a member of the Speech Group at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) at the University of Maryland. She has led projects on modeling disfluencies, punctuation, dialog, emotion, and speakers, using lexical and prosodic features, and published more than 150 journal and conference papers in speech science, speech technology, and related fields. Shriberg has served as an associate editor of Language and Speech and on the boards of Speech Communication and Computational Linguistics. She has served on a range of conference and workshop boards, on the ISCA Advisory Council, and on the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) Permanent Council.