Nelson Harold Morgan (born May, 1949) is an American computer scientist and professor in residence (emeritus) of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.[2] Morgan is the co-inventor of the Relative Spectral (RASTA) approach to speech signal processing, first described in a technical report published in 1991.[3][4]

Nelson Harold Morgan
BornMay 1949 (age 75)
EducationUniversity of Chicago
University of California, Berkeley
Scientific career
InstitutionsNational Semiconductor
University of California, Berkeley
Thesis Room Acoustics Simulation with Discrete-time Hardware  (1980)
Doctoral advisorRobert W. Brodersen
Doctoral studentsOriol Vinyals
Websitewww2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/morgan.html

Education and career

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Morgan was born in Buffalo, New York.[1] He studied at University of Chicago, later he received his PhD as an NSF fellow from University of California, Berkeley in 1980 under the supervision of Robert W. Brodersen.[5] Morgan worked at National Semiconductor before taking up the post as a professor in residence at University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he founded ICSI's Realization Group, which later become known as the Speech Group, in 1988. He served as director of ICSI from 1999 through 2011.[6]

Research and contributions

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In 1993, Morgan and Herve Bourlard published their work on the hybrid system approach to speech recognition, which uses neural networks probabilistically with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs).[7] The system improved automatic speech recognition techniques based on HMMs by providing discriminative training, incorporating multiple input sources, and using a flexible architecture able to accommodate contextual inputs and feedbacks. The work has been described as "seminal.".[8] Morgan won the 1996 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for a paper with Bourlard.[9] Morgan and Bourlard were awarded the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition."[10]

Morgan was the principal investigator of the IARPA-funded project Outing Unfortunate Characteristics of HMMs, which sought to identify problems in automatic speech recognition technology.[11] He also led a team of universities to build speech recognition systems for low resource languages as part of the IARPA Babel program.[12]

Morgan was the former director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), where he was also the Speech Group leader.[13] He recently has focused on campaign reform through empowering volunteerism. In that work, he co-founded UpRise Campaigns with Antonia Scatton, and later co-founded Neighbors Forward AZ with Alison Porter.

Morgan has produced more than 200 publications, including four books,[14][15]

Honors and awards

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Morgan is a fellow of the IEEE[16] and the International Speech Communication Association.[17] Together with Hervé Bourlard, he won the 1996 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award and was awarded the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition."[10] He was on the editorial board of Speech Communication Magazine, of which he is a former co-editor-in-chief.[18]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Nelson Morgan, Class of 1967". Hamburg Alumni Foundation. Retrieved 2022-11-24.
  2. ^ Author biography, Speech and Audio Signal Processing, Wiley Publishing, 2011
  3. ^ RASTA-PLP Speech Analysis, Hynek Hermansky, Nelson Morgan, Aruna Bayya, and Phil Kohn, ICSI Technical Report TR-91-069, December 1991
  4. ^ RASTA-PLP Speech Analysis Technique, Hynek Hermansky, Nelson Morgan, Aruna Bayya, and Phil Kohn, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP-92), Vol.1, No., pp. 121-124 March 1992. doi: 10.1109/ICASSP.1992.225957
  5. ^ NSF Graduate Research Fellows[permanent dead link]. Retrieved 28 February 2012
  6. ^ Wahlster, Wolfgang (2012). "Interview with Dr. Roberto Pieraccini, Director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley, USA". Ki - Künstliche Intelligenz. 26 (3): 289–291. doi:10.1007/s13218-012-0217-0.
  7. ^ Connectionist Speech Recognition: A Hybrid Approach, Nelson Morgan and Herve Bourlard, Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, Vol. 247, 1993
  8. ^ Hybrid HMM/Neural Network Based Speech Recognition in Loquendo ASR, Roberto Gemello, Franco Mana, and Dario Albesano
  9. ^ IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award Recipients, IEEE Signal Processing Society
  10. ^ a b IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award Recipients
  11. ^ Speech Tech Blog, Michele Masterson, June 20, 2012
  12. ^ "ICSI Leads Team Researching Ways to Build Speech Recognition Systems for New Languages Under Severe Data and Time Constraints". November 28, 2012. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  13. ^ SLTC Newsletter Archived 2016-04-04 at the Wayback Machine, IEEE Signal Processing Society, May 2012
  14. ^ Speech and Audio Signal Processing, Ben Gold and Nelson Morgan, Wiley Publishing, 1999
  15. ^ Speech and Audio Signal Processing, Second Edition, Ben Gold, Nelson Morgan, and Dan Ellis, 2011
  16. ^ IEEE Fellows Archived 2010-06-19 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 28 February 2012.
  17. ^ [1] ISCA 2010 Fellows. Retrieved 28 February 2012
  18. ^ Speech Communication Editorial Board, Elsevier Publishing.