Nikki Mirghafori recognized speech for the first time
in Persian circa 1970. By the time she graduated from high school
(Valedictorian) in Dekalb, IL, her speech recognition system
had become bilingual. In 1991 she received her BS in computer science
(with Highest Honors) from University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign, in the flat-lands where sky is
-wide. She
then worked at Digital Equipment Corp. in Littleton, MA, extending the
perplexity of her expertise in software engineering. In Fall 1992,
she kissed her lucrative career goodbye and joined the ranks of
starving graduate students at the University of California at
Berkeley. She received her MS in computer science working on
"Robustness to Fast Speech in Automatic Speech Recognition"
in 1995. In December of 1998, she received her PhD from the
Computer Science Division of
the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department at the University of California at
Berkeley, while working at the International Computer Science
Institute (ICSI) and receiving much appreciated advice from Professor Nelson
Morgan. Her dissertation was on "A Multi-Band Approach to
Automatic Speech Recognition". She then joined the Research and
Development team at Nuance Communications in Menlo Park, California,
where she faced the challenges of speech and speaker recognition in
real world applications, and worked to improve the former and the stock
price. In 2003 she re-joined her alma mater lab, the International Computer Science
Institute (ICSI) as a research scientist.
Her research interests include, but are not limited to, the following:
speaker recognition, automatic speech
recognition, multi-band approaches, speaking rate variabilities,
and combination of probability estimators. She is a past president of
the Computer Science
Graduate Student Association at UC Berkeley, and has been the
(lucky) recepient of fellowships and honors, such as the Mentored
Research fellowship, GANN fellowship, Max Tepper scholarship, Edmund
James Scholar, Phi Kappa Phi, and Tau Beta Pi. She has co-authored
over two dozen technical publications and two patent applications.
When she is not chained to her workstation, she enjoys hiking,
backpacking, swimming, running, rock climbing, traveling, gourmet
cooking, wine tasting, jazz & classical music, Buddhist
meditation, dancing (salsa, swing, flamenco, ...), black and white photography,
performing improvised comedy, making mixed media art, ....