Alexander Waibel (born 2 May 1956 in

Heidelberg Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...

, Germany) is a professor of Computer Science 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 ...

and

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; german: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie) is a public research university in Karlsruhe, Germany. The institute is a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT was created in 2009 w ...

. Waibel's research interests focus on speech recognition and translation and human communication signals and systems. Waibel is known for the

time delay neural network Time delay neural network (TDNN) Alexander Waibel, Tashiyuki Hanazawa, Geoffrey Hinton, Kiyohito Shikano, Kevin J. Lang, Phoneme Recognition Using Time-Delay Neural Networks', IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Volume 3 ...

(TDNN), which he developed. It is the first

convolutional neural network In deep learning, a convolutional neural network (CNN, or ConvNet) is a class of artificial neural network (ANN), most commonly applied to analyze visual imagery. CNNs are also known as Shift Invariant or Space Invariant Artificial Neural Netwo ...

(CNN) trained by

gradient descent In mathematics, gradient descent (also often called steepest descent) is a first-order iterative optimization algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function. The idea is to take repeated steps in the opposite direction of the ...

, using the

backpropagation In machine learning, backpropagation (backprop, BP) is a widely used algorithm for training feedforward neural network, feedforward artificial neural networks. Generalizations of backpropagation exist for other artificial neural networks (ANN ...

algorithm. Alex Waibel introduced the TDNN 1987 at ATR in Japan. BBC summed up Alex Waibel's motivation: "We don’t want to look things up in dictionaries – so I wanted to build a machine to translate speech."

Life

He graduated from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, and

. Dr Waibel is the director of interACT, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies. He was one of the founders of C-STAR, an international consortium for speech translation research, and served as its chairman from 1998 to 2000. Waibel directed the CHIL program (FP-6 Integrated Project on multimodality) in Europe and NSF-ITR project STR-DUST (the first domain independent speech translation project) in the U.S. He is project coordinator of the IP EU-BRIDGE, funded by the EC and started on 1 February 2012. At C-STAR, his team developed the JANUS speech translation system, the first American and European Speech Translation system, and more recently the first real-time simultaneous speech translation system for lectures. His lab has also developed a number of multimodal systems including perceptual meeting rooms, meeting recognizers, meeting browsers and multimodal dialog systems for humanoid robots. In the areas of speech, speech translation, and

multimodal interface Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple Modality (human–computer interaction), modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data. Introduction Multimodal hu ...

s Dr. Waibel holds several patents and has founded and co-founded several successful commercial ventures. He is the founder and chairman of Mobile Technologies, LLC, maker of the

Jibbigo Jibbigo was a mobile offline language translation application that was developed by Mobile Technologies, LLC and Dr. Alex Waibel, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Jibbigo is an offline voice translator and does not need phone or data connectivity to ...

mobile speech-to-speech translation app which uses

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

and

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

. In 2012, Waibel produced a video lecture demonstrating the world's first automatic simultaneous translation service at a university, stating that "the lecture translator automatically records, transcribes and translates the speech of a lecturer in real time, and students can follow the lecture in their own language on their PC or mobile phone." In 2013 he joined

Facebook, INC Meta Platforms, Inc., (file no. 3835815) doing business as Meta and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns Facebook, Instagra ...

to start the Language Technology Group which would eventually become part of Facebook's broader Applied Machine Learning efforts. He is a director at Multimodal Technologies, Inc. In 2017 Dr. Waibel was elected as member of the

Academy of Sciences Leopoldina The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (german: Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften), short Leopoldina, is the national academy of Germany, and is located in Halle (Saale). Founded ...

, the national academy of Germany. In October 2018 Dr. Waibel closed out a successful legal case against Wikimedia Foundation citing German libel laws.

References

External links

Urteil im Fall Waibel
Wikimedia Foundation, 12 September 2018
A German court forced us to remove part of a Wikipedia article’s ‘history.’ Here’s what that means.
''Wikimedia Foundation,'' 11 April 2019 {{DEFAULTSORT:Waibel, Alex Living people American computer scientists German computer scientists 1956 births Members of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina