Frederic Davidson

Professor Emeritus

Dr. Fred Davidson has been a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University since 1975 until he retired last semester. He currently is still dedicating his time and knowledge to undergraduates in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests were in optical communications, quantum electronics, optical coherence, quantum optics, photorefractive materials, and photoconductive semiconductors. Professor Davidson is a Senior member of the IEEE, is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, has been an Associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications, and a reviewer for a number of referred journals. He has consulted with a number of commercial companies and has been the recipient of many NSF, NASA, and DOD grants. He has edited a book, has over 50 technical journal papers, he has over 40 conference papers, and he has mentored about twenty-five graduate students. His educational background is in physics (Cornell University – BSEE, 1964; University of Rochester – Ph.D., 1969).

Hynek Hermansky 

Professor Emeritus

Hynek Hermansky has been at the forefront of groundbreaking research in human hearing and speech technology research for more than four decades, both in industrial research labs and in academia. His main research focus is on using bio-inspired methods to recognize information in speech-related signals.

Hermansky has for more than a decade led an internationally acclaimed group of Johns Hopkins faculty, students, and visiting researchers at the CLSP, which comprises one of the largest and most prestigious speech and language-oriented academic groups in the world. In addition to his leadership of the CLSP, and was also affiliated with Hopkins’ Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. He currently holds a part-time position as a research professor at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic. His past affiliations include the visiting faculty at Google Deep Mind in Tokyo, director of research at IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland (2003-2008), titular professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (2005-2008), professor at the Oregon Health and Sciences University (previously Oregon Graduate Institute), a senior member of the Research Staff at the U.S. WEST Advanced Technologies in Boulder, CO, and research engineer at Panasonic Technologies in Santa Barbara, California.

His achievements include more than 350 peer-reviewed papers with more than 20,000 citations, and 13 patents, in topics such as a method for identifying keywords in machine recognition of speech based on the detection and classification of sparse speech sound events; a system to compute speech recognition for cell phone; and an auditory model to detect speech corrupted by additional background noises. Hermansky’s scientific contributions were recognized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers  (IEEE) which awarded him the 2021 James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Medal, and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), which awarded him in 2013 its highest honor, the Medal for Scientific Achievement.

Hermansky’s service to the field is extensive and noteworthy. He is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a Fellow of the ISCA. Highly sought-after by the industry for his expertise, he is a current member of the advisory board for Germany’s Hearing4All Scientific Consortium Center of Excellence in Hearing Research, and he has served on advisory boards for Amazon, Audience, Inc., and VoiceBox Inc. He was twice elected as a board member of ISCA and is a member of the editorial board of Speech Communication, he also was an associate editor for IEEE Transaction on Speech and Audio and a former member of the editorial boards for Phonetica.

Hermansky serves in leadership roles for the field’s key workshops and conferences presents invited lectures and keynote presentations around the globe and has lectured worldwide as the Distinguished Lecturer for ISCA and IEEE. Hermansky is the General Chair of INTERSPEECH 2021 in Brno, Czech Republic was a General Chair of the 2015 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), and chair of the technical committee for the ICASSP 2000.  In addition to leading several Hopkins’ CLSP workshops, he was also on the organizational committee for ASRU 2017, 2013, and ASRU 2005, for ten years was the executive chair of the annual ISCA-sponsored workshops on Text, Speech, and Dialogue in the Czech Republic, and was a tutorial speaker at Interspeech 2015.

He received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1972) from Technical University Brno, Czech Republic, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1983) from the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Richard I. Joseph

Jacob Suter Jammer Professor Emeritus

Richard I. Joseph was termed an expert in optical fibers and statistical mechanics methods. Due to his research in the field he was bestowed the honor of Jacob Suter Jammer Professor in 1983.

Gerard Meyer

Professor Emeritus

Gerard Meyer received his PhD in 1970 from the University of California, Berkley, and soon joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1972.  Meyer is developing (1) synthesis methods for optimization algorithms to be used on large scale, ill conditioned problems; (2) analysis approaches to study the convergence of these algorithms and finally (3) systematic implementation schemes for both synchronized distributed memory and shared memory machines. These approaches have been used on factorization problems, pattern recognition problems and robust anomaly detection. 

Wilson J. Rugh

Edward J. Schaefer Professor Emeritus

Wilson J. Rugh joined the department faculty in 1969 and until his retirement in 2007 focused his teaching and research on systems and control theory. He has authored three books and over 50 journal articles. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, as well as a past-president of that Society. Professor Rugh was an early advocate of using interactive tools on the internet for education and with students developed the well-known site Demonstrations in Signals, Systems, and Control. This site received the Premier Award of the National Engineering Education Delivery System in 2001. He also received both the Huggins Award and the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Award for excellence in teaching. Further information, including lists of research publications and downloadable resources related to his books, can be found at his personal website.