Mari Ostendorf is a professor of electrical engineering in the area of speech and language technology and the vice provost for research at the University of Washington.

Mari Ostendorf
NationalityAmerican
Alma materStanford University (B.S., 1980; M.S., 1981; Ph.D., 1985;) [1]
AwardsMember of the National Academy Engineering (2021)
IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (2018)
Scientific career
FieldsElectrical Engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Washington (1999 - present)
Boston University (1987 - 1999)
BBN Technologies (1985 - 1987)
Doctoral advisorRobert Gray

Biography edit

She received her doctorate degree from Stanford University in 1984 under Robert Gray and afterwards worked at BBN and as a professor at Boston University before coming to University of Washington in 1999.[2]

In the late 1980s, Ostendorf was one of several speech recognition experts that began to be involved in the computational linguistics community after a series of DARPA workshops involving experts from both domains.[3] She remains active in both the speech and natural language processing communities.

Ostendorf was instrumental in designing the ToBI standard for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech in the period between 1991 and 1994.[4] Ostendorf participated in multiple DARPA programs including GALE in 2005 and Babel in 2012.

She was the lead faculty advisor for the student team that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize for the design of a conversational AI on the Alexa platform.[5]

Awards edit

In 2005, Ostendorf was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and, in 2008, she was named a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for her contributions to the study of prosody and rich transcription.[6]

Ostendorf is the recipient of the 2018 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.[7]

Ostendorf was selected as a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2018 for "significant contributions to prosody, pronunciation, acoustic, language modeling, and developments in using out-of-domain data and discourse structure."[8]

In 2019, she was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences.[9] In 2020 she was elected as a corresponding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[10]

In February 2021, Ostendorf was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) "for contributions to statistical and prosodic models for speech and natural language processing and for advances in conversational dialogue systems."[11]

References edit

  1. ^ Bio of Mari Ostendorf
  2. ^ "White House names Stanford's Robert Gray among nation's top engineering mentors". 18 March 2003. Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  3. ^ Jurafsky, Dan. "The Spread of Innovation in Speech and Language Processing". YouTube. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
  4. ^ Beckman; Hirschberg; Shattuck-Hufnagel (2003). Prosodic Models and Transcription: Towards Prosodic Typology.
  5. ^ "UW Team wins international Amazon Alexa Prize for the design of conversational AI". Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  6. ^ "ISCA Fellows 2008". ISCA. Retrieved 26 March 2018.
  7. ^ "IEEE JAMES L. FLANAGAN SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING AWARD RECIPIENTS" (PDF). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  8. ^ "ACL Fellows". ACL. Retrieved 19 December 2018.
  9. ^ "New Members Elected to WSAS" (PDF). Washington State Academy of Sciences. 15 July 2019. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
  10. ^ "Professor Mari Ostendorf CorrFRSE". Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 2020-09-23.
  11. ^ "National Academy of Engineering Elects 106 Members and 23 International Members". NAE Website. Retrieved 2021-02-10.

External links edit