Mari Ostendorf is a professor of electrical engineering in the area of speech and language technology and the vice provost for research at the University of Washington.

Biography

She received her doctorate degree from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1984 under Robert Gray and afterwards worked at BBN and as a professor at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

before coming to

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

in 1999. In the late 1980s, Ostendorf was one of several speech recognition experts that began to be involved in the computational linguistics community after a series of DARPA workshops involving experts from both domains. She remains active in both the speech and natural language processing communities. Ostendorf was instrumental in designing the

ToBI ToBI (; an abbreviation of tones and break indices) is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, whic ...

standard for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech in the period between 1991 and 1994. Ostendorf participated in multiple DARPA programs including GALE in 2005 and

Babel Babel is a name used in the Hebrew Bible for the city of Babylon and may refer to: Arts and media Written works Books *Babel (book), ''Babel'' (book), by Patti Smith * Babel (2012 manga), ''Babel'' (2012 manga), by Narumi Shigematsu * Babel (20 ...

in 2012. She was the lead faculty advisor for the student team that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize for the design of a conversational AI on the Alexa platform.

Awards

In 2005, Ostendorf was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and, in 2008, she was named a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for her contributions to the study of prosody and rich transcription. Ostendorf is the recipient of the 2018

IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award The IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award is a Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers#Technical field awards, Technical Field Award presented by the IEEE for an outstanding contribution to the advancement of speech a ...

. Ostendorf was selected as a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2018 for "significant contributions to prosody, pronunciation, acoustic, language modeling, and developments in using out-of-domain data and discourse structure." In 2019, she was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. In 2020 she was elected as a corresponding member of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

. In February 2021, Ostendorf was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) "for contributions to statistical and prosodic models for speech and natural language processing and for advances in conversational dialogue systems."

References

External links

University website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ostendorf, Mari Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Stanford University School of Engineering alumni Boston University faculty University of Washington faculty Fellow Members of the IEEE Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering