Hynek Hermansky

Hynek Hermansky has been at the forefront of groundbreaking research in human hearing and speech technology research for more than three decades, both in industrial research labs and in academia.

Hermansky’s research aims at detecting, identifying, classifying, transmitting, and reconstructing information contained in sensory signals, and has far-reaching implications for machine-based artificial intelligence. His main focus is on using bio-inspired methods to recognize information in speech-related signals.

Hermansky leads 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, Hermansky is affiliated with Hopkins’ Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and holds the position of research professor on leave at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic. His past affiliations include the 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 250 peer-reviewed papers with more than 16,000 citations, and 13 patents, with another eight pending applications 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 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), a Fellow of the ISCA, and an External Fellow of the International Computer Science Institute. 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. His professional memberships include IEEE and ISCA, where he was twice elected as a board member. He is a member of the editorial board of Speech Communication, and 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 were lecturing worldwide as the Distinguished Lecturer for ISCA and for 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, ASRU2013  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 a M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1972) from Technical University Brno, Czech Republic and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1983) from University of Tokyo, Japan.