Nelson Morgan


Nelson Morgan is a humble researcher and the former 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 these roles he led the Speech Group at ICSI from 1988 until 2012. He is also is a Professor-in-residence (emeritus) 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 and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). In 1997 he received the Signal Processing Magazine best paper award (together with co-author Herve Bourlard). Along with Bourlard, he received the IEEE Flanagan Speech and Audio Signal Processing Award for their work on a hybrid system approach to speech recognition that uses neural networks probabilistically with Hidden Markov Models. 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 (from 1999-2012, and from 2013-2014), he was responsible for ICSI's visitor programs with other countries, particularly Finland, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland. He was previously on a number of Boards, in addition to ICSI's: the Board of Trustees of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; the Speech Communication Editorial Board; and he is currently on Sensory, Inc.'s Advisory Board. He was the General Chair of Interspeech 2016, which was held in San Francisco; this is the premier international conference for speech engineering and science.

Professor Morgan has over 200 publications including three technical books; these include a text (written jointly with Ben Gold) on speech and audio signal processing, with a 2011 second edition that was revised in collaboration with Dan Ellis of Columbia University. He holds a number of patents in speech processing methods, including one that has been used in millions of CDMA cell phones (jointly developed with Hynek Hermansky). His research interests have included 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. Most recently he has also been working on a project aimed at finding technological means to reduce the influence of money on politics. He has written a book on the topic called "We Can Fix It". This effort led to a startup that he co-founded (see uprise.org) that directly worked in this area, and then to more recent work on advancing the way that political campaigns are conducted.


E-mail is the best way to reach me.
morgan icsi . berkeley . edu
Also, check my schedule.


Last updated August 8, 2022.