Kenneth N. Stevens
- Associated organizations
- MIT, Sensimetrics Corporation
- Fields of study
- Communications
Biography
The field of speech research owes much to Dr. Gunnar Fant and Dr. Kenneth N. Stevens, who first collaborated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949. Dr. Fant has been instrumental in creating the multi-disciplinary area of speech communications and technology, while Dr. Stevens has pioneered the science and engineering of speech acoustics, production, perception and processing. Their textbooks 'Dr. Fant's Preliminaries to Speech Analysis' (co-authored by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle) and 'Acoustic Theory of Speech Production' and Dr. Stevens' 'Acoustic Phonetics' remain definitive speech processing texts.
Dr. Stevens is the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and head of the research laboratory of electronics' speech communication group at MIT. He also is consultant to Sensimetrics Corporation in Somerville, Massachusetts. An IEEE Life Fellow, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. A Fellow and past president of the Acoustical Society of America, he has received that society's gold medal and the U.S. National Medal of Science.
