All I really need to know I learned from Lou and Nat: Lou Braida

Abstract

Lou Braida was one of my two primary mentors in graduate school at MIT. Lou taught me innumerable things. In this talk, I will only have time to focus on a few items. I will describe how I applied to Speech Recognition what I learned from him about the power of a psychophysical approach to research problems, the importance of good data collection, and the value of long-term spectral characteristics in perception. Speech recognition by now is a relatively mature field, but at the time the field was relatively unexplored territory. Lou’s training allowed me to see ways to make advances in speech recognition experimental design, speaker-independent speech recognition, and noise-immune features and processing. While many of these early ideas have been subsumed over the years by more sophisticated processing, many of them have their roots in techniques inspired by a combination of perceptual knowledge with principled engineering design. Lou was, and is a master of both and I am forever grateful for his inspiration, mentoring, and friendship in shaping my career.