Nelson Morgan

Nelson Morgan is the Director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), an independent not-for profit research laboratory that is closely affiliated with UC Berkeley. In addition to directing the Institute he has led the Speech Group at ICSI since 1988. He is also a Professor-in-residence 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 may have been the first to use neural networks for speech classification in a commercial application, and to incorporate time-frequency distributions for event-related potentials (brain waves). He is a former Editor-in-chief of Speech Communication, and has been a member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee and the IEEE Neural Networks Committee. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE. In 1997 he received the Signal Processing Magazine best paper award. He was the Principal Investigator for the multi-site coalition funded by the DARPA EARS Novel Approaches project, which was the 2002-5 US government program focusing on long term progress in speech recognition.

Professor Morgan has been the US representative on a number of collaborations with European researchers, including several European Union projects. As Director (since 1999), he is responsible for ICSI's visitor programs with other countries, particularly Finland, Spain, Germany, and Switzerland. He is also on the Scientific Advisory Board for IDIAP, a Swiss research institute.

Professor Morgan has roughly 200 publications including three books; his most recent book is a text (written jointly with Ben Gold) 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 current 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.

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