Alan W Black is a Scottish

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, known for his research on

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

. He is a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Biographical sketch
from Black's CMU web site, retrieved 2010-07-18. Black did his undergraduate studies at Coventry University, graduating in 1984. He earned a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1993. After working at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in

Kansai Science City is an unincorporated city located in the , a border region between Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara Prefectures in Kansai region, Japan. The name is commonly shortened to or . The name Keihanna is constructed by extracting a representative kanji from Kyo ...

, Japan and at the University of Edinburgh, he took a research faculty position at Carnegie Mellon in 1999. In 2008 he became a regular faculty member with tenure at CMU. Black wrote the Festival Speech Synthesis System at Edinburgh, and continues to develop it at Carnegie Mellon. He has also worked on machine translation of speech at CMU, and is the co-founder and was chief scientist at

Cepstral In Fourier analysis, the cepstrum (; plural ''cepstra'', adjective ''cepstral'') is the result of computing the inverse Fourier transform (IFT) of the logarithm of the estimated signal spectrum. The method is a tool for investigating periodic str ...

, a Pittsburgh-based speech translation technology company.Cepstral leadership
retrieved 2010-07-18.

References

External links

Faculty web page
at CMU * Living people Scottish computer scientists Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Carnegie Mellon University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) {{Compu-scientist-stub