Hermann Ney Receives Google Focused Research Award

Professor Hermann Ney, Chair of Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition at RWTH Aachen University, has been presented with the Google Focused Research Award for his groundbreaking contributions in the field of automatic speech recognition.

The prize money of one million dollars will be used to fund further research activities of Ney’s group, which seeks to further improve speech recognition systems with the help of speech data, thus reducing the number of errors in automatic speech recognition.

New approaches are to be developed for the recognition of words that are unknown to the system, that is, currently not included in its potentially very large vocabulary.

Furthermore, the researchers are working on methods that make it possible to correctly process speech in noisy and reverberant environments. Earlier this year, within the European Union's LISTEN project,the Chair hosted an international workshop and summer school on the topic of far-field large-vocabulary speech recognition in Bonn. High-profile keynote speakers from research, business and industry, including companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, participated in the workshop.