{"id":11998,"date":"2017-03-02T15:12:08","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T20:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/?p=19630"},"modified":"2017-03-02T15:12:08","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T20:12:08","slug":"voice-technology-education-johns-hopkins-amazon","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/ece\/news\/voice-technology-education-johns-hopkins-amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"Voice technology education at Johns Hopkins gets a boost from Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Soundwave\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At a time when more home, office and vehicle devices respond to vocal commands, Amazon has selected Johns Hopkins University<\/a> among the first four schools to receive support from the Alexa Fund<\/a> Fellowship, a new program designed to encourage advances in voice communication between people and machines.<\/p>\n

Amazon has entered this field with Alexa, a voice service that powers devices such as the Amazon Echo. Through its new Alexa Fund Fellowship program, introduced today, the company will aid university students who are focusing \u201con transformative voice technologies such as text-to-speech, natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition and conversational artificial intelligence,\u201d according to an online announcement by Douglas Booms, Vice President of Worldwide Corporate Development, Amazon.<\/p>\n

Referring to the \u201cenormous promise\u201d of voice technology, Booms said, \u201cOur teams here at Amazon are working hard to unlock that potential, but innovation requires a collective effort, from large companies like ours to two-person startups, and from casual hobbyists to major academic institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

To jump-start higher education efforts, the Alexa Fund Fellowship\u2019s first group of university participants, Booms announced, are Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California and the University of Waterloo, located in Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n

At Johns Hopkins, the Alexa Fund Fellowship will support a doctoral student, called the Alexa Fellow, who will mentor and provide technical advice and supervision to students enrolled in a master\u2019s degree program that focuses on human language technology, including speech recognition and text understanding.<\/p>\n

In this new program, groups of two to four master\u2019s students will team up to devise and test novel algorithms for speech and natural language processing and speaker recognition. The Alexa Fellow will offer guidance as these team projects evolve over two semesters. Amazon, in addition to its financial support for this doctoral student, will also provide Alexa-enabled devices for use in appropriate master\u2019s team projects.<\/p>\n

Johns Hopkins\u2019 Whiting School of Engineering has been deeply involved in speech and language technology for at least two decades, when its Center for Language and Speech Processing<\/a> was established. The center, widely considered one of the nation\u2019s top academic programs in this field, also hosts a highly-acclaimed summer workshop series<\/a> that attracts many scholars in the field. A number of students who\u2019ve conducted their doctoral dissertation research at the center have gone on to work for Amazon and other prominent technology firms. The Alexa Fund Fellowship is expected to expand this connection.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are pleased to deepen our relationship with Amazon through the Alexa Fund Fellowship to support our PhD program in our Center for Language and Speech Processing,\u201d said Ed Schlesinger<\/a>, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the university\u2019s Whiting School. \u201cAdvancing our relationships with corporate leaders such as Amazon will assist us in our mission to continue to make positive impacts on society through our research, education, and translational activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The doctoral student who will serve as the first Alexa Fellow at Johns Hopkins is expected to be in place this fall to begin mentoring master\u2019s degree student teams in the language and speech processing program.<\/p>\n

Sanjeev Khudanpur<\/a>, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of electrical and computer engineering<\/a> and long-time language and speech processing scholar, says the program should benefit both the doctoral student, who gains leadership experience while also receiving financial support, and the master\u2019s students who get hands-on help from an expert mentor as they learn about an important emerging technology. \u201cTo me,\u201d Khudanpur said, \u201cthis reflects a very good approach.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-11998","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVoice technology education at Johns Hopkins gets a boost from Amazon - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/ece\/news\/voice-technology-education-johns-hopkins-amazon\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Voice technology education at Johns Hopkins gets a boost from Amazon - 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