Hermann Ney

Professor Hermann Ney is the Chair of the Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition department at RWTH University in Aachen, Germany, one of the largest and most renowned technical universities in Europe. Dr. Ney has devoted his life to statistical methods for pattern recognition and human language technology and its application to speech recognition, machine translation, and image object recognition. He has specialized in dynamic programming and discriminative training for speech recognition, on phrase-based approaches to machine translation, and on language modeling. His efforts are renowned throughout the language industry, and has resulted in more than 48,000 citations, 700 conference and journal papers, and a Google Scholar index of 92. Dr. Ney is the 2019 winner of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award; and the recipient of the 2018 Google Focused Research Award, for his groundbreaking contributions to speech recognition. In addition, Dr. Ney has also won the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award; the 2013 Award of Honor by the International Association for Machine Translation; and the 2010 DIGITEO award for speech recognition and machine translation. Dr. Ney has also worked on several vital R&D language projects, including the EU’s LISTEN project; QUAERO (France): GALE (U.S.); TC-Star (EU); and Verbmobil (Germany). He has previously worked for AT&T Bell Labs, and for the Phillips Research Laboratories. Dr. Ney continues to have a monumental impact on the ASR and MT industry, as he has placed more than 60 of his PhD students within the AI and Language departments of all the leading speech technology giants around the globe, including Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google, IBM and Nuance, in addition to AppTek.