Dilek Z. Hakkani-Tür is a Turkish-American computer scientist focusing on

speech processing Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of signals. The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to ...

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. It is also ...

, and

dialogue system A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and ...

s. She is a professor of computer science at the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

Education and career

Hakkani-Tür is a 1994 graduate of

Middle East Technical University Middle East Technical University (commonly referred to as METU; in Turkish language, Turkish, ''Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi'', ODTÜ) is a prestigious public university, public Institute of technology, technical university located in Ankara, ...

Ankara Ankara is the capital city of Turkey and List of national capitals by area, the largest capital by area in the world. Located in the Central Anatolia Region, central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5,290,822 in its urban center ( ...

, Turkey. She continued her studies at

Bilkent University Bilkent University () is a private non-profit research university located in Ankara, Turkey. It was founded by İhsan Doğramacı, the first president of the Council of Higher Education and the head of the prominent Doğramacı family, with th ...

, also in Ankara, where she earned a master's degree in 1996 and completed her Ph.D. in 2000. She worked as a researcher at

AT&T Labs AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown Township, New J ...

from 2001 to 2005, at 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 ...

from 2006 to 2010, at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

from 2010 to 2016, at Google Research from 2016 to 2018, and at

Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant technology marketed by Amazon and implemented in software applications for smart phones, tablets, wireless smart speakers, and other electronic appliances. Alexa was largely developed from a Polish speech s ...

from 2018 to 2023. At Microsoft, she was in the team of scientists that built the first prototype of the Cortana virtual assistant. While working for Amazon Alexa, she also taught at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

as a distinguished visiting instructor. She joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty in 2023. She was editor-in-chief of ''IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing'' from 2019 to 2021, and is president of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...

for the 2023–2025 term. She also serves as the co-editor-in-chief of

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics ''Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics'' (commonly abbreviated ''TACL'') is an annual peer-reviewed open-access academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of computational linguistics and natural language proc ...

since 2024.

Recognition

In 2014, Hakkani-Tür was elected as an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

"for contributions to spoken language processing", and as a Fellow of the

International Speech Communication Association The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a non-profit organization and one of the two main professional associations for speech communication science and technology, the other association being the IEEE Signal Processing Society ...

"for contributions to advancing the state-of-the-art in spoken language processing, especially for human/human and human/machine conversational understanding". In 2024, she was elected as a Fellow of the

for her contributions to spoken dialogue systems.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hakkani-Tur, Dilek Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Turkish computer scientists Turkish women computer scientists American computer scientists American women computer scientists Natural language processing researchers Middle East Technical University alumni Bilkent University alumni AT&T people Microsoft Research people Amazon (company) people University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Fellows of the IEEE