Stephen E. Levinson (September 27, 1944,

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

) is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

(UIUC), leader of the Language Acquisition and Robotics Lab at UIUC, and a full-time faculty member of the

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dedicated to interdisciplinary research. A gift from scientist, businessman, and philanthropist Arnold O. Beckman (1900–2004) an ...

at UIUC. He works on speech synthesis, acquisition and recognition and the development of anthropomorphic robots.

Early life and education

Stephen E. Levinson was born on September 27, 1944 in New York City. He earned a B. A. degree in Engineering Sciences at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1966. He earned his M. S. (1972) and Ph.D. (1974) degrees in Electrical Engineering at the

University of Rhode Island The University of Rhode Island (URI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Kingston, Rhode Island, United States. It is the flagship public research as well as the land-grant university of the state of Rhode Island ...

Kingston, Rhode Island Kingston is a village and a census-designated place within the New England town, town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, South Kingstown in Washington County, Rhode Island, Washington County, Rhode Island, United States, and the site of the main ...

Career

Levinson worked as a design engineer at General Dynamics from 1966-1969, after completing his bachelor's degree, and as an instructor in computer science at Yale University from 1974-1976, after completing his Ph.D. In 1976, he joined AT&T

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

Murray Hill, New Jersey Murray Hill is an unincorporated community located within portions of both Berkeley Heights and New Providence, located in Union County in northern New Jersey, United States. It is the longtime central location of Bell Labs (part of Nokia si ...

. There he studied speech recognition and understanding. He was a visiting researcher at the NTT Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory in

Tokyo, Japan Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

in 1979, and a visiting fellow at

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

in 1984. In 1990, Levinson was appointed head of Linguistics Research at Bell Labs. He directed 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 ...

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 the translation of spoken language. In 1997, Levinson moved to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the

, where he leads the Language Acquisition and Robotics Lab. His areas of teaching and research include speech and language processing, speech synthesis, and language acquisition. Levinson is developing computational models of the brain, mind, and language acquisition using an

iCub iCub is a 1 metre tall open source robotics humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence. It was designed by the RobotCub Consortium of several European universities and built by Italian Institute of ...

humanoid robot. The robot is designed to learn through experience, similar to the way in which a human child might learn. Levinson is the first researcher in North American to work with this type of robot, which was designed in Europe. Skills that researchers hope to teach the robot include

juggling Juggling is a physical skill, performed by a juggler, involving the manipulation of objects for recreation, entertainment, art or sport. The most recognizable form of juggling is toss juggling. Juggling can be the manipulation of one object o ...

walking Walking (also known as ambulation) is one of the main gaits of terrestrial locomotion among legged animals. Walking is typically slower than running and other gaits. Walking is defined by an 'inverted pendulum' gait in which the body vaults o ...

, talking, and

memory formation Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

. Levinson has published more than 100 technical papers and holds several patents. He is a founding editor of the journal ''Computer Speech and Language'', and an editor of the journal ''Speech Technology''. Among others books, Levinson is the author of ''Mathematical Models for Speech Technology'' (2005) and co-author of ''Autonomous Robotics and Deep Learning'' (2014) and ''Autonomous Military Robotics'' (2014).

Awards and honors

* fellow,

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

(IEEE) 1986 for contribution to the theory and application of statistical pattern recognition to automatic speech recognition. * fellow,

Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary orga ...

1983 * member,

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levinson, Stephen E. 1944 births Living people 21st-century American engineers University of Illinois faculty Harvard University alumni University of Rhode Island alumni