Voice Technology Education at Johns Hopkins Gets a Boost From Amazon

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Voice Technology Education at Johns Hopkins Gets a Boost from AmazonEngineering Students Will Receive Help from a Skilled Mentor and Access to Alexa Devices

Newswise — At a time when more home, office and vehicle devices respond to vocal commands, Amazon has named the Johns Hopkins University among the first four schools to receive support from the Alexa Fund Fellowship, a new program designed to encourage advances in voice communication between people and machines.

Amazon has entered this field with Alexa, a voice service that powers devices such as the Amazon Echo. Through its new Alexa Fund Fellowship program, introduced today, the company will aid university students who are focusing “on transformative voice technologies such as text-to-speech, natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition and conversational artificial intelligence,” according to an online announcement by Douglas Booms, vice president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon.

Referring to the “enormous promise” of voice technology, Booms said, “Our teams here at Amazon are working hard to unlock that potential, but innovation requires a collective effort, from large companies like ours to two-person startups, and from casual hobbyists to major academic institutions.”

To jump-start higher education efforts, the Alexa Fund Fellowship’s first group of university participants, Booms announced, are the Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California and the University of Waterloo, located in Ontario, Canada. At Johns Hopkins, the Alexa Fund Fellowship will support a doctoral student, called the Alexa Fellow, who will mentor and provide technical advice and supervision to students enrolled in a master’s degree program that focuses on human language technology, including speech recognition and text understanding.

In this new program, groups of two to four master’s students will team up to devise and test algorithms for speech and natural language processing and speaker recognition. The Alexa Fellow will offer guidance as these team projects evolve over two semesters. Amazon, in addition to its financial support for this doctoral student, will also provide Alexa-enabled devices for use in appropriate master’s team projects.

Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering has been deeply involved in speech and language technology for more than two decades, since its Center for Language and Speech Processing was established. The center, widely considered one of the nation’s top academic programs in this field, also hosts a highly acclaimed summer workshop series that attracts many scholars. A number of students who conducted their doctoral dissertation research at the center have gone on to work for Amazon and other prominent technology firms. The Alexa Fund Fellowship is expected to expand this connection.

“We are pleased to deepen our relationship with Amazon through the Alexa Fund Fellowship to support our Ph.D. program in our Center for Language and Speech Processing,” said Ed Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School. “Advancing our relationships with corporate leaders such as Amazon will assist us in our mission to continue to make positive impacts on society through our research, education, and translational activities.”

The doctoral student who will serve as the first Alexa Fellow at Johns Hopkins is expected to be in place this fall to begin mentoring master’s degree student teams in the language and speech processing program.

Sanjeev Khudanpur, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and long-time language and speech processing scholar, says the program should benefit both the doctoral student, who gains leadership experience while also receiving financial support, and the master’s students who get hands-on help from an expert mentor as they learn about an important emerging technology. “To me,” Khudanpur said, “this reflects a very good approach.”

Related links:Feature story on Johns Hopkins’ Center for Language and Speech ProcessingAmazon Blog Post about the The Alexa Fund Fellowship ### .