This group conducts research in areas that range from the materials used for the transduction of acoustic signals to signal processing involved in extracting relevant information from the acoustic signatures and leading the interpretation of the information to extract meaning and/or translating between languages. The team is extremely multidisciplinary, with faculty who have expertise in material science, neuroscience, applied mathematics, and computer science. Some faculty members are directly involved in the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and with the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (COE), and others are involved in other cross-university initiatives.

Primary ECE faculty members in this area are: Muyinatu Bell, Najim Dehak, Mounya Elhilali, Hynek Hermansky, Sanjeev Khudanpur, and James West.