History of Speech and Language Technology

Joseph Mariani is the Director of the Information and Communication Technologies Department of the Technology Directorate, the ministry in charge of research in France. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supériieure de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, and received Ph.D. degrees in Engineering in Science from Paris VI University. He has contributed research in the areas of human-machine communication, spoken language processing, speech recognition, language technologies resources and evaluation, and multimodal communication. He has served as head of the Speech Communications Group at (LIMSI), as manager of the Human-Machine Communication Department, and, from 1989 to 2000, as General Manager for LIMSI. He was Vice-President of the Speech Group of the French Acoustical Society (SFA) from 1982-1986, President of the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA) (now called the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)) from 1988 to 1993, and President of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Among his many honors are the award of the French National Science and Defense prize in 1985 and of the ESCA Special Medal in 1999.

Additional information on Dr. Mariani can be found at:
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/mariani/
which is translated into English at:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/mariani/
&prev=/search%3Fq%3DJoseph%2BMariani%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG

An interview was conducted with Dr. Mariani at Interspeech 2005, the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology in Lisbon, Portugal, September 4-8, 2005, by Dr. Janet Baker. The text of this interview has not yet been transcribed, but a brief excerpt of the recorded interview is available.

Brief excerpt of recorded interview.