Alberto Ciaramella (born 1947) is an Italian computer engineer and scientist. He is notable for extensive pioneering contributions in the field of speech technologies and applied natural language processing, most of them at

CSELT Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni (CSELT) was an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. It played a major role internationally especially in the stand ...

and

Loquendo Loquendo is a multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Torino, Italy, that provides speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification and identification applications. Loquendo, which was founded in 2001 u ...

, with the amount of 40 papers and four patents.

Biography

Ciaramella obtained the Laurea in

Electronic Engineering Electronics engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering which emerged in the early 20th century and is distinguished by the additional use of active components such as semiconductor devices to amplify and control electric current ...

and the Post-Laurea in 1969 at

La Sapienza The Sapienza University of Rome ( it, Sapienza – Università di Roma), also called simply Sapienza or the University of Rome, and formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a public research university located in Rome, Ita ...

University in

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

with prof. Antonio Ruberti as supervisor of his thesis. Then, he joined CSELT as a research engineer. In 1975 he patented at CSELT one of the first architecture-independent bootstrap devices that allowed the ''Gruppi Speciali'' (the first electronic Italian telephone switch and the most advanced project in Italian in the seventies) to start up by pushing a single button from a

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

memory in case of failure. During the 80s Ciaramella took part in some European projects (Esprit P26, SUNDIAL) in the pioneering field of speech recognition and dialogue systems on many European languages, such as Italian, during which he proposed a method to evaluate the quality of the dialogue systems by comparing the meanings. In 1983 he co-authored one of the first international patents on

speaker recognition Speaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to ''speaker recognition'' or speech recognition. Speaker verification ...

, a new research field at that time, applied commercially in a speech recognition software licensed by CSELT. In 1990 he co-authored one of the first international patents of a real-time

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 ...

system integrated in a microprocessor suitable for being used by a Telecommunication company: the microprocessor was named RIPAC (''Riconoscitore di Parlato Connesso'' - as stated in the patent description itself). Extensive research was conducted on the

Hidden Markov Model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an o ...

aimed to speech recognition tasks, by using small such as big dictionaries and applied to many cases - e.g. the recognition of the children's voice, or browser navigation by voice. Other contributions include test and proposals in international communication standards, such as

VoiceXML VoiceXML (VXML) is a digital document standard for specifying interactive media and voice dialogs between humans and computers. It is used for developing audio and voice response applications, such as banking systems and automated customer service ...

. In 2001 the CSELT's voice technology group became

and Alberto Ciaramella became

Competitive intelligence Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive environment to improve organizational performance. It involves the systematic collection and analysis of information from ...

supervisor of the company. In 2005 Ciaramella founded IntelliSemantic at the Incubator of

Politecnico di Torino The Polytechnic University of Turin ( it, Politecnico di Torino) is the oldest Italian public technical university. The university offers several courses in the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Urban Planning and Industrial Design, and is co ...

, an innovative company that works in the field of Competitive Business Intelligence. Also within his present company, he continues the research in the field of the applied language technologies. In 2010 he co-authored a paper about his view about the application of the emerging "semantic" technologies to the patent analysis, which became popular in the field of Patent Informatics, and took part in Topas European projectBrügmann, S., Bouayad-Agha, N., Burga, A., Carrascosa, S., Ciaramella, A., Ciaramella, M., ... & Müller, A. (2015). Towards content-oriented patent document processing: Intelligent patent analysis and summarization. World Patent Information, 40, 30-42. focused on patent summarization.

Bibliography

* Billi, R., Canavesio, F., Ciaramella, A., & Nebbia, L. (1994, September). Interactive voice technology at work: The CSELT experience. In Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications, 1994., Second IEEE Workshop on (pp. 43–48). IEEE. * Pirani, Giancarlo, ed. Advanced algorithms and architectures for speech understanding. Vol. 1. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013. * Billi, Roberto, ed. Tecnologie vocali per l'interazione uomo-macchina. Nuovi servizi a portata di voce, CSELT, 1995, . (Italian)

References

External links

A bit of History: Alberto Ciaramella Biography (in Italian)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ciaramella, Alberto Living people Italian computer scientists 20th-century Italian engineers Sapienza University of Rome alumni 20th-century Italian inventors 1947 births