# Nelson Morgan

### Research Areas

- Signal Processing (SP)

### Research Centers

- Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR)
- International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)

## Biography

Nelson Morgan is the former Director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), an independent not-for profit research laboratory that is closely affiliated with UC Berkeley. He also led the Speech Group at ICSI from 1988 to 2013. He is a Professor-in-residence Emeritus in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. as an NSF Fellow in 1980. He has been working on problems in signal processing and pattern recognition since 1974, with a primary emphasis on speech processing. He is a former Editor-in-chief of Speech Communication, and has been a member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee, the IEEE Neural Networks Committee, and the ISCA Advisory Council. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). In 1997, he received the Signal Processing Magazine best paper award. Together with collaborator Herve Bourlard he has been awarded the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition." This work included the development of the hybrid system approach to speech recognition, which uses neural networks probabilistically with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs).

He was the Principal Investigator for the multi-site coalition, funded by the DARPA EARS Novel Approaches project, which was the 2002-5 U.S. government program focusing on long-term progress in speech recognition.

Professor Morgan has over 200 publications, including three books; his most recent book is a text (written jointly with Ben Gold, and more recently its second edition with Dan Ellis) on speech and audio signal processing. He holds a number of patents in speech processing methods, including one that is currently being used in millions of CDMA cell phones. His research interests include the redesign from first principles of the primary signal processing used in speech recognition systems and the use of neural networks for the design of these new features. He is also now working on a wholly unrelated project to find structural and technological means to reduce the political influence of large campaign contributions.

Professor Morgan was for many years on the Board of Trustees of ICSI and Sensory, Inc.'s Advisory Board. He has previously been on many others, including the Board of Trustees of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and the Speech Communication Editorial Board; .

## Education

- 1980, PhD, Electrical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley

## Selected Publications

- O. Vinyals and N. Morgan, "Deep vs. Wide: Depth on a Budget for Robust Speech Recognition," in Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2013), 2013.
- R. Stern and N. Morgan, "Hearing is Believing: Biologically-Inspired Feature Extraction for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition," Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 34-43, Nov. 2012.
- N. Morgan, "Deep and Wide: Multiple Layers in Automatic Speech Recognition," IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 7-13, Jan. 2012.
- B. Gold, N. Morgan, and D. Ellis, Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music, 2nd ed., Wiley, 2011.
- J. Chong, G. Friedland, A. Janin, N. Morgan, and C. Oei, "Opportunities and Challenges of Parallelizing Speech Recognition," in 2nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar'10), 2010.
- J. M. Baker, L. Deng, J. Glass, S. Khudanpur, C. Lee, N. Morgan, and D. O'Shaugnessy, "Research Developments and Directions in Speech Recognition and Understanding, Part 2," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 78-85, July 2009.
- J. M. Baker, L. Deng, J. Glass, S. Khudanpur, C. Lee, N. Morgan, and D. O'Shaugnessy, "Research Developments and Directions in Speech Recognition and Understanding, Part 1," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 75-80, May 2009.
- N. Morgan, Q. Zhu, A. Stolcke, K. Sonmez, S. Sivadas, T. Shinozaki, M. Ostendorf, P. Jain, H. Hermansky, D. Ellis, G. Doddington, B. Chen, O. Cretin, H. Bourlard, and M. Athineos, "Pushing the envelope - aside [speech recognition]," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 81-88, Sep. 2005.
- N. Morgan, D. Baron, S. Bhagat, H. Carvey, R. Dhillon, J. Edwards, D. Gelbart, A. Janin, A. Krupski, B. Peskin, T. Pfau, E. Shriberg, A. Stolcke, and C. Wooters, "Meetings about meetings: Research at ICSI on speech in multiparty conversations," in Proc. 2003 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Vol. 4, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2003, pp. 740-743.
- N. Morgan and E. Fosler-Lussier, "Combining multiple estimators of speaking rate," in Proc. 1998 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Vol. 2, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 1998, pp. 729-732.
- N. Morgan and H. Bourlard, "Continuous speech recognition: An introduction to the hybrid HMM/connectionist approach," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 25-42, May 1995.
- H. Hermansky and N. Morgan, "RASTA processing of speech," IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 578-589, Oct. 1994.
- N. Morgan, H. Bourlard, S. Greenberg, and H. Hermansky, "Stochastic perceptual auditory-event-based models for speech recognition," in Proc. 1994 Intl. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. 4, Tokyo, Japan: Acoustical Society of Japan, 1994, pp. 1943-1946.
- N. Morgan, "Big dumb neural nets: A working brute force approach to speech recognition," in Proc. 1994 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Neural Networks: IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Vol. 7, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 1994, pp. 4462-4465.
- N. Morgan and H. Bourlard, "Factoring networks by a statistical method," Neural Computation, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 835-838, Nov. 1992.
- A. S. Gevins, N. Morgan, S. L. Bressler, B. A. Cutillo, R. M. White, J. Illes, D. S. Greer, J. C. Doyle, and G. M. Zeitlin, "Human neuroelectric patterns predict performance accuracy," Science, vol. 235, no. 4788, pp. 580-585, Jan. 1987.
- A. S. Gevins and N. Morgan, ""Ignorance-based" systems," in Proc. 1984 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Vol. 9, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 1984, pp. 39A.5.1-4.

## Awards, Memberships and Fellowships

- SPS James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2022
- International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Fellow, 2010
- Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow, 1999