I am a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle Washington. I am also an adjunct professor in Computer Science & Engineering and the department of Linguistics. I am also a co-founder of the Signal, Speech, and Language Interpretation Laboratory here in the department. I received my Ph.D. from the Computer Science Division of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California in Berkeley. I was also a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, and a member of the Realization group there.

I am a 2001 NSF Career award winner, a 2002 CRA Digital Government Fellow, and a 2008 NAE Gilbreth Lectureship award recipient

My primary interests lie in statistical modeling (particularly graphical model approaches) and signal processing for pattern classification, speech recognition, language processing, bioinformatics, machine learning, submodularity in combinatorial optimization and machine learning, active and semi-supervised learning, and audio/music processing. I am particularly interested in temporal graphical models (or dynamic graphical models, which includes HMMs, DBNs, and CRFs) and ways in which to design efficient algorithms for them and design their structure so that they may perform as better structured classifiers. I also have strong interests in speech-based human-computer interfaces, the statistical properties of natural objects and natural scenes, information theory and its relation to natural computation by humans and pattern recognition by machines, and computational music processing (such as human timing subtleties). I am also quite interested in high performance computing systems, computer architecture, and software techniques to reduce power consumption.

Current and Recent Past Activities

Invited speaker at the Modern Aspects of Submodularity workshop at Georgia Tech in March, 2012.

I was selected to be an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for the 2011/2012 year.

I am a workshop co-chair for NIPS 2011 in Granada, Spain.

I am co-organizing a NIPS 2011 Workshop on Discrete Optimization in Machine Learning: Structures, Algorithms and Applications (DISCML). Third year running.

I am on the Scientific Program Committee of the 2011 Joint ICML/ACL Symposium on Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing. Deadline submission is April 15th, 2011. Please submit.

I am co-organizing a NIPS 2010 Workshop on Discrete Optimization in Machine Learning: Structures, Algorithms and Applications (DISCML). Submission deadline is Friday October 29, 2010.

I am on the committee for the UAI 2010 Approximate inference evaluation. See here for details.

Starting in March 2010, I began a three-year term as a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

I am the general chair of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence in 2010 (UAI2010).

I am on the technical program committee for an HLT/NAACL-2010 workshop on speech and language processing for assitive technologies. Web page and submission information is here.

I am on the senior program committee of AAAI-2010. Submission deadline is Jan 18th, 2010.

I am co-organizing a NIPS 2010 workshop on submodularity and discrete optimization in machine learning. The program is here

I am a technical chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) in 2009.

I was program co-chair of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2009) along with Andrew Ng. Please see here.

For the academic year 2008/2009 I was on sabbatical at the Max-Planck Institute for biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, working in Bernhard Schölkopf's group.

Organizer of the Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, Kobe Japan, 2008 sponsored by the NAE.

I ran the 1st inference evaluation at UAI2006 in (2006).

Less Recent Activities

Senior Program Committee: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 2007

Program Committee: Association for the Advancement of Articial Intelligence (AAAI), 2007.

IEEE Speech Technical Committee, 2003-2007

Program Chair for HLT/NAACL in 2006.

Program committee (2nd year in a row) for Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), in 2005

Program committee for Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), in 2004

General chair for IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), in 2003.

Senior Group member, Johns Hopkins summer workshop on automatic speech recognition in 2002.

Group leader, Johns Hopkins summer workshop on automatic speech recognition in 2001.