Prof. Ney Receives Google Focused Award for Research on Automated Speech Recognition

Professor Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney, full professor at RWTH Chair of Computer Science 6 (Language Processing and Model Recognition), has been awarded the Google Focused Award for his groundbreaking work on automatic speech recognition. The prize is worth 1 million US dollars. The prize money will fund further research by the Aachen chair.

These cover a broad spectrum: On the one hand, speech recognition systems are further improved on the basis of speech data and thus the number of errors in speech recognition is reduced. This will also involve new approaches to recognizing words that are still unknown to the system, i.e. not contained in its (perhaps very large) vocabulary.

On the other hand, the scientists are working on correctly processing speech even under the difficult condition of room reverberation or with background noise. In summer 2018, the chair organized an international conference in Bonn to which renowned colleagues were invited. The conference took place at initiative of the EU-funded project LISTEN and got great response. Top-class invited speakers from industry and academia underlined the high level of the event.