Privileging Signal: Listen and Keep it Moving

The WISE Inspirations Network at Stanford (WINS) aims to create an engaged Stanford network linking women graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and alumnae in STEM fields, and their allies and advocates, through regular meetings and communications. WINS provides opportunities to learn from a diverse array of stand-out women in science and engineering about the realities of their lives and work, successes and lessons learned, and to connect individuals with a network of potential mentors, protégés, and other colleagues.
The Winter 2016 WINS features world-renowned scholar, engineer, entrepreneur and Professor of Electrical Engineering Carol Espy-Wilson of the University of Maryland, whose pioneering research integrates engineering, linguistics, and speech science. Her talk, "Privileging Signal: Listen and Keep it Moving," is followed by a networking reception. "Being an African American woman in electrical engineering has been particularly challenging, as an undergraduate at Stanford, a graduate student at MIT and a professor at Research 1 universities. In addition, founding a company to commercialize technology drawn from my research program is requiring even more fortitude. I attribute my ability to navigate these terrains to faith, resourcefulness, passion and courage. In this talk, I will share some of my experiences and lessons learned along this journey."
Biography: Carol Espy-Wilson, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, heads the Speech Communication Lab which conducts basic research in speech acoustics, speech production and feature extraction. She also applies the knowledge gained from fundamental research to the development of speech technologies such as speech inversion (acoustic-to-articulatory mapping), automatic speech recognition, emotion recognition, speaker recognition, speech enhancement, speech segregation and assistive technologies.
Dr. Espy-Wilson received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1979, and a M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, 1984 and 1987, respectively. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, she was a faculty member at Boston University.
Dr. Espy-Wilson has authored or coauthored numerous papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of IEEE. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard during her sabbatical from 2008–09. Among the other honors and awards she has received are the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship (1990), a Career Award from the National Institutes of Health (1998), the Honda Initiation Award in (2003, 2004), the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award at the University of Maryland (2012), and an ISR Fellow Award (2015). She served as the chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the ASA (2007-10), as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2010-present), and as an elected member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE (2010-12). She also served on the Language and Communication Study Section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and currently serves on the Advisory Council for the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at NIH.
Dr. Espy-Wilson is currently the Founder and CEO of OmniSpeech LLC, which is commercializing technology from her research program. OmniClear is a single-microphone software-only noise suppression solution that improves voice quality in stationary and dynamic noise environments for speech communication devices. OmniSpeech has 8 employees and is now ready to go to market with embedded and server-based products.