Alex Waibel

Alex Waibel (actually Alexander Waibel) is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and is the director of interACT, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies. Waibel's research interests focus on speech recognition and translation and human communication signals and systems.

One significant scientific contribution of Waibel are Time delay neural networks, which he developed.

Dr. Waibel was one of the founders of C-STAR, an international consortium for speech translation research, and served as its chairman from 1998-2000. His team developed the JANUS speech translation system, the first American and European Speech Translation system, and more recently the first real-time simultaneous speech translation system for lectures. His lab has also developed a number of multimodal systems including perceptual Meeting Rooms, Meeting Recognizers, Meeting Browsers and multimodal dialog systems for humanoid robots. Waibel directed the CHIL program (FP-6 Integrated Project on multimodality) in Europe and NSF-ITR project STR-DUST (the first domain independent speech translation project) in the U.S. He is project coordinator of the IP EU-BRIDGE, funded by the EC and started on February 1, 2012. In the areas of speech, speech translation, and multimodal interfaces Dr. Waibel holds several patents and has founded and co-founded several successful commercial ventures. He is the founder and chairman of Jibbigo, a mobile speech-to-speech translation app which uses speech recognition and machine translation.