Alejandro ACERO Senior Researcher and Manager Speech Technology Group

	Before joining Microsoft in 1994, I worked in the speech groups of Apple Computer and Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo. I received a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, a Master's from Rice University in 1987 and an engineering degree from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in 1985, all in Electrical Engineering. I'm also an affiliate Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Washington.
	Research interests:
	Speech Recognition: robustness to noise, rapid adaptation, acoustic modeling, signal processing.
	Spoken Language Systems: rapid prototyping of speech understanding systems.
	Speech Synthesis: automatically trained concatenative synthesis and distribution-based synthesis.

Senior member of IEEE.
Chair (2000-2002) and member (1996-2000) of the Speech Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Sponsorship Chair of the 1999 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding.
Publications Chair of ICASSP98.
General Co-Chair of the 2001 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding.
Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2003-present).
Associate Editor for Computer, Speech and Language (1994-present).
Reviewer for numerous conferences and journals such as ICASSP, ICSLP, Eurospeech, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, IEEE Spectrum and Speech Communication.
Tutorial on Spoken Language Processing, with M. Rahim, at ICASSP 2002.

Spoken Language Processing (Prentice Hall, 2001).
Acoustical and Environmental Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
and has written invited chapters in 3 edited books:
holds 8 patents and has over 60 publications.

The Decade of Machines, that Understand Speech