Nelson Harold Morgan (born May, 1949) is an American computer scientist and professor in residence (emeritus) of electrical engineering and computer science at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. Morgan is the co-inventor of the Relative Spectral (RASTA) approach to speech signal processing, first described in a technical report published in 1991.

Education and career

Morgan was born in

Buffalo, New York Buffalo is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New York (behind only New York City) and the seat of Erie County. It is at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of the Niagara River, and is across the Canadian border from South ...

. He studied at

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, later he received his PhD as an NSF fellow from

in 1980 under the supervision of Robert W. Brodersen. Morgan worked at

National Semiconductor National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drive ...

before taking up the post as a professor in residence at

. At Berkeley, he founded ICSI's Realization Group, which later become known as the Speech Group, in 1988. He served as director of ICSI from 1999 through 2011.

Research and contributions

In 1993, Morgan and Herve Bourlard published their work on the hybrid system approach to speech recognition, which uses neural networks probabilistically with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs).
Connectionist Speech Recognition: A Hybrid Approach
', Nelson Morgan and Herve Bourlard, Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, Vol. 247, 1993 The system improved automatic speech recognition techniques based on HMMs by providing discriminative training, incorporating multiple input sources, and using a flexible architecture able to accommodate contextual inputs and feedbacks. The work has been described as "seminal.". Morgan won the 1996 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for a paper with Bourlard. Morgan and Bourlard were awarded the 2022

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 ...

"For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition." Morgan was the principal investigator of the

IARPA The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responsible for leading research to overcome difficult challenges relevant to the United States Intellige ...

-funded project Outing Unfortunate Characteristics of HMMs, which sought to identify problems in automatic speech recognition technology. He also led a team of universities to build speech recognition systems for low resource languages as part of the IARPA

Babel program The IARPA Babel program developed speech recognition technology for noisy telephone conversations. The main goal of the program was to improve the performance of keyword search on languages with very little transcribed data, i.e. low-resource langua ...

. Morgan was the former director of the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

(ICSI), where he was also the Speech Group leader. He recently has focused on campaign reform through empowering volunteerism. In that work, he co-founded UpRise Campaigns with Antonia Scatton, and later co-founded Neighbors Forward AZ with Alison Porter. Morgan has produced more than 200 publications, including four books,

Honors and awards

Morgan is a fellow of the IEEE and the International Speech Communication Association. He was on the editorial board of ''Speech Communication Magazine'', of which he is a former co-editor-in-chief.Speech Communication Editorial Board
Elsevier Publishing.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morgan, Nelson Living people American computer scientists Fellow Members of the IEEE 1949 births People from Buffalo, New York University of Chicago alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty