Brian Roark's Academic activities

Selected recent/current academic activities

• I am co-organizing (w/Kyle Gorman, Emily Prud’hommeaux and Richard Sproat) the Second Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2024), to be held in conjunction with LREC-COLING in Torino, Italy, May 21, 2024. The workshop is sponsored by the newly-formed ACL Special Interest Group on Writing Systems and Written Language (SIGWrit), which I helped establish in 2023.
• I co-organized the First ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL), which was held in Toronto, July 2023.
• I was co-Editor-in-chief for the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) from 2018-2022.

Former Students, student visitors and post-docs:

• Ebru Arisoy, visiting student, March-Dec. 2007.   Went to IBM after PhD.  Now Assistant Professor at MEF University, Istanbul.
• Russ Beckley, PhD student, 2010-2015.  Now at Ernst & Young.
• Steven Bedrick, post-doc (jointly advised with Richard Sproat), Feb. 2011 - Feb. 2013.  Now Associate Professor at OHSU.
• Nathan Bodenstab, Ph.D. 2012. Now Research Scientist Manager at Nuance.
• Yongshun Chen, MS, 2011.
• Erinç Dikici, visiting student from Bogazici University, Oct.2012 - Jan.2013.  Now Speech Scientist at SAIL LABS Technology, Vienna.
• Aaron Dunlop, Ph.D. 2014.  Research Scientist at Intel, 2014-2016.  Now Senior Research Scientist at Nuance.
• Seeger Fisher, PhD student, 2004-2011.
• Andrew Fowler, Ph.D. 2020 (advised by Steven Bedrick).  Software Engineer at Google, 2015-2018.  Now Senior Researcher at Nuance.
• Kristy Hollingshead, Ph.D. 2010. Post-doc at UMD, 2010-2012. At DoD, 2012-2014. Research Scientist at Florida Institute for
  Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) 2014-2019.  Now Data Scientist at Clearbrief.
• Youngjun Kim, MS 2008.  Became PhD student at University of Utah with Ellen Riloff, now a post-doc at the Medical University of South Carolina.
• Meg Mitchell, regular visiting student 2010-2012, while a Ph.D. student at University of Aberdeen. Post-doc at JHU CoE, 2012-13.
  Researcher at Microsoft Research, 2013-2016. Research Scientist at Google, 2016-2021. Now Research Scientist at Hugging Face.
• Christian Monson, post-doc, Dec. 2008 - Nov. 2010. Research Scientist at Nuance 2010-2013.  Machine Learning Scientist at Amazon 2013-2018.
  Now Speech Engineer at DefinedCrowd Corp.
• Eric Morley, PhD 2016.  Senior Data Scientist at RedOwl Analytics, 2015-2016.  At Goldman Sachs, 2016-2018.  Now Software Engineer at Google.
• Emily T. Prud'hommeaux, Ph.D. 2012. Post-doc at University of Rochester, 2013-14. Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, 2014-2018.
  Now Assistant Professor at Boston College.
• Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Ph.D. 2016.   Software Architect at Intel, 2015-2017.  Now assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

Selected previous academic activities

• Action editor (like an area chair) for the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics from 2012-2018.
• Spent a week in summer, 2016, at JHU working with a team investigating automated assessment of neurodegenerative disorders.
• Area chair for EMNLP, 2016.
• Helped found SIG-SLPAT, the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies.
• Co-guest editor of a 2013 special issue of the journal Computer Speech and Language on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies.
• Co-organized the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), held in Montreal following NAACL-HLT in June, 2012.
• Co-organized the First Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), held in Los Angeles following NAACL-HLT in June, 2010.
• Co-organized the CHI 2012 Workshop on Designing and Evaluating Text Entry Methods at CHI in Austin, TX, May, 2012.
• While on sabbatical, spent September, 2011, in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, Scotland, as part of a SICSA visiting fellowship. Also visited University of Cambridge first week of October.
• Team leader for project at 2011 CLSP summer workshop at JHU
• Local arrangements chair of ACL-HLT 2011 in Portland, June, 2011
• Participated in JHU Summer Workshop, 2005.
  

Selected Grants

• Computational characterization of language use in autism spectrum disorder, NIH, NIDCD Grant (PI Sproat), 2011-2016.
• Semi-Supervised Discriminative Training of Language Models, NSF (IIS) RI Grant, 2010-2013, Collaborative with JHU
• Translational refinement of adaptive communication system for locked-in patients, NIH, NIDCD Grant (PI Fried-Oken), 2009-2014.
• Efficient hidden structure annotation via structural multiple-sequence alignments, NSF (IIS) RI Grant, 2008-2011
• DHB: Measuring Spoken Language Variability in Elderly Individuals, NSF (BCS) HSD Grant, 2008-2011
• Discriminative Syntactic Language Modeling: Automatic Feature Selection and Efficient Annotation, NSF (IIS) Career Grant, 2005-2010

Patents

• Language-agnostic multilingual modeling using effective script normalization.
  (with Arindrima Datta, Bhuvana Ramabhadran and Jesse Emond). U.S. Patent Number 11,615,779.
• Transliteration for speech recognition training and scoring.
  (with Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Min Ma, Pedro Moreno and Jesse Emond). U.S. Patent Number 11,417,322.
• Generating output for presentation in response to user interface input, where the input and/or the output include chatspeak.
  (with Nicole Quah, Bryan Horling, Maryam Garrett and Richard Sproat). U.S. Patent Number 10,268,683.
• Enhanced maximum entropy models.
  (with Fadi Biadsy). U.S. Patent Number 9,412,365.
• System and method for using meta-data dependent language modeling for automatic speech recognition
  (with Michiel Bacchiani). U.S. Patent Number 7,752,046.
• System and method of using meta-data in speech processing
  (with Michiel Bacchiani, Sameer Maskey and Richard Sproat). U.S. Patent Number 7,996,224.