Dr. Richard Goldhor
Senior Research Fellow and Board Member, Speech Technology and Applied Research Corp. (STAR)
Richard Goldhor is a Senior Research Fellow at STAR Corp. He received his PhD from MIT’s Speech Communications group. He has over 25 years of experience developing innovative speech and signal processing algorithms and commercially successful consumer products. He directed the software development of the world’s first commercial 1000-word speech recognizer for Kurzweil AI (now Nuance), was co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of AudioFile, Inc. (a developer of Windows-based audio products), and co-founder and VP of Engineering at Enounce, Inc., where he managed the development of consumer products for timescale modification (i.e., the slow-down and speed-up) of digital multimedia. He has extensive experience mentoring technology transfer efforts: transferring innovative but still-imperfect technology from research contexts into effective commercially successful products.
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Dr. Joel MacAuslan
President and Chief Science Officer, Speech Technology and Applied Research Corp. (STAR)
Joel MacAuslan, PhD, developed the landmark-based and other speech-processing methods and algorithms that underlie SpeechMark. This especially includes (with Prof. Fell) the SpeechMark MATLAB function toolbox and (with Profs. Fell and Boyce variously) the applications for several projects that have used these functions. Dr. MacAuslan began his career in 1980 developing image-processing algorithms for a division of Kodak, based on degrees in applied math and astrophysics. He founded STAR in 1995 to perform research funded by the US National Institutes of Health, especially for commercially focused applications in image-, signal-, and speech-processing.
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Dr. Harriet Fell
Professor, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Harriet Fell is a Professor Emeritus in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. She works on the design and development of assistive technology and on medical applications. She was the Principal Invertigator on the Early Vocalizationa Project, the first software that was designed specifically to analyze pre-speech utterances. With Joel MacAuslan, she designed and developed the visiBabble system to encourage syllabic utterance in children at risk for being non-speaking. She has also applied speech processing to detect non-verbal information in speech, such as emotional stress. She has worked with Richard Goldhor, Joel MacAuslan, and Suzanne Boyce, to produce SpeechMark, a software tool for scientists interested in speech articulation as a marker for neurological status. She is currently coPI with Tim Bickmore on an NSF project to build a virtual co-presenter, a software agent that can present a talk along with a human speaker.
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Dr. Suzanne Boyce
Professor, Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
Suzanne Boyce has been working on acoustic analysis of speech all her professional life, through undergraduate and graduate school (A.B., Harvard University), doctoral student (Ph.D., Yale University), two postdoctoral positions in speech recognition and signal processing for speech (M.I.T. and Boston University), and a further graduate degree in Speech-Language Pathology (C.A.G.S., Boston University) specializing in articulation disorders. She has had continuous research support from the National Institutes of Health since 1995. Her most recent projects include ultrasound technology for speech sound disorders, and automatic detection of change in the acoustic signal corresponding to changes in the precision of speech articulation, as a result of accommodation to listener need or health status.
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Marisha Speights
M.S., CCC-SLP and doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati
Marisha Speights, M.S., CCC-SLP, is a speech language pathologist and doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. She specializes in the assessment and treatment of speech sound and language disorders in children. Marisha was the recipient of an NIH pre-doctoral grant funded to investigate innovative acoustic tools for neuroscience. Her research interests include testing automated methods for tracking acoustic and articulatory change in young children, the development of software tools for quantitative assessment of speech sound disorders, and the use of speech acoustics for remote assessment by telepractice. Marisha teaches speech acoustics to undergraduate and graduate students. She also pursues interests in the development of acoustic tools that assist students in understanding the interaction between articulation and acoustics of speech. She conducts usability studies, to evaluate the design of the SpeechMark products, with teachers and students of speech science to help improve the translation of our research tools into teaching and clinical practice. Read CV
Acknowledgements
Speech Technology & Applied Research Corp. gratefully acknowledges the support of the United States National Institutes of Health, including NIH Grants R43/44 DC010104, R42 AG033523, R41/42 DC005534, R21 HL086689, and R41/42 HD034686.