Alexander Waibel

Alexander Waibel

Alexander Waibel

Awards

IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award

Biography

Alexander Waibel has made pioneering contributions to better human communication via multilingual and multimodal processing. His most visible work is the TDNN (the first convolutional neural net) and neural approaches to multilingual and multimodal interfaces. Societally and economically, he has had a broad impact on modern communication through frequent transfer of academic results to government and humanitarian missions, and through several startups. Waibel’s startup Jibbigo (acquired by Facebook; 2013) created the first speech translator on a mobile phone. Kites (acquired by Zoom; 2021) is another startup of his that brought the first simultaneous lecture translator to public use.

An IEEE Life Fellow and Member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Waibel is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.