Fred Jelinek, director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing and a pioneer in computer research, died suddenly on September 14, at the age of 77.
A member of the Whiting School faculty since 1993, he suffered a heart attack while at work at Hopkins. Jelinek, the Julian Sinclair Smith Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was a pioneer in the field of automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. He is widely credited with creating the technical foundations of the field as it stands today.
Born near Prague, Jelinek was a faculty member at Cornell before joining IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in 1972 as a senior manager of the Continuous Speech Recognition Group. There, from 1972 through 1993, he conducted seminal research in continuous speech recognition, machine language translation, and text parsing and understanding. Jelinek published widely and over the course of his career, received numerous awards and honors, including election as a fellow of the IEEE and as one of 12 inaugural fellows of the International Speech Communication Association. In 2006, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
“He envisioned applying the mathematics of probability to the problem of processing speech and language. This revolutionized the field,” noted colleague Sanjeev Khudanpur, in an obituary that appeared in the Johns Hopkins Gazette.
“Fifty years ago, no one thought that was possible. Today, it’s the dominant paradigm.” Gifts made in honor of Jelinek will benefit the Frederick Jelinek Fund and will support an endowed fellowship for graduate students. For more information call (410) 516-8723 or visit engineering.jhu.edu/Fred_Jelinek_gift.