People

Charles S. Watson, Ph.D., President, Professor Emeritus of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University. Chuck is an auditory psychophysicist who has spent many years studying the hearing of complex sounds and individual differences in auditory perception. In addition, in 1979 he and his colleagues at the Boys' Town Institute built the first speech training system in the world to use automatic speech recognition technology. The Indiana Speech Training Aid is a highly evolved version of this first system. His most recent research has dealt with individual differences in the auditory abilities of children and adults, and with the prediction of academic success in grade school children, on the basis of sensory, cognitive, and linguistic abilities.

Diane Kewley-Port, Ph.D., Vice-President, Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University. Diane's areas of special expertise are speech acoustics, digital signal processing, and speech perception. In addition to her work on the design and evaluation of CDT's speech training systems, Diane's current research is on vowel production and perception, including second-language speech. She has always conducted her research using computers. When the programs for performing acoustic analyses of speech sounds didn't exist, she wrote them. And she still does.

Daniel P. Maki, Ph.D., Secretary/Treasurer, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Indiana University. Dan's specialization is finite mathematics and its applications. He has had a working interest in speech recognition algorithms since a sabbatical spent at Interstate Electronics in the 1970's. His team there developed an isolated word recognizer that used a coding scheme that reduced the acoustic representation of a word to 256 bits. That this recognizer actually produced very good results remains a milestone. He brings this experience to the development of CDT's speaker-dependent recognition technologies.

James D. Miller, Ph.D., Principal Scientist. Jim is an experimental psychologist who is an internationally recognized expert on aspects of hearing and deafness. He is Director of Research Emeritus of the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, was a co-inventor of the digital hearing aid, and is an expert on speech perception by normal and hearing-impaired persons. He has been heading up CDT's efforts to develop training systems to help users of hearing aids and cochlear implants recognize speech more accurately with those devices.

Jonathan Dalby, Ph.D., Senior Scientist. Jonathan's graduate degree is in Linguistics with a concentration in acoustic phonetics. He has served several stints as a teacher of English as a second language, including a couple of Peace Corps years in Tunisia. At CDT he has been research and development manager for the HearSay and You-Said-It systems as well as associate investigator on the ISTRA project. He has been working on applications of automatic speech recognition technologies since 1985. Jonathan is also on the faculty of Indiana-Purdue University at Fort Wayne.

Deborah Burleson, M.A., PH.D, Research Associate. Dr. Burleson recently completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Indiana University. Her responsibilities have included the design and conduct of training studies using HearSay, and she has made numerous contributions to the development of the SPATS systems. She is also an experienced provider of accent reduction services to ESL speakers. Debbie is currently employed as a research administrator at the Indiana University Medical School in Indianapolis, but continues as a consultant to CDT .

Bill Mills, M.A., Programmer/Linguist. Bill is one of a very few individuals world-wide to have this title and the job description that goes with it. One of Bill's graduate degrees is in Linguistics and he is fluent in Spanish and C++, has a working knowledge of Nahuatl and HTML, and has reported that he occasionally dreams in Fortran (these are usually nightmares). Bill has written the speech recognition interface for all of CDT's training systems, as well as all of the code to convert ISTRA to a Windows-based application.

Roy Sillings, M.S., Systems Designer/Artistic Director/Programmer. Roy's graduate degree is in Instructional Systems Technology, and he is a whiz at designing computer-based training systems. As if that isn't enough, he also writes a lot of the code to implement the system designs. As if that isn't enough, he also creates many of the graphics in our training systems. To top it all off, he reads Greek and Latin and has had his paintings shown at the Indiana University Art Musuem.

Doreen Devitt, M.A., CCC-SLP. Doreen is a speech/language pathologist who received her professional training in the Indiana University Speech and Hearing Sciences Department. She conducted the language sample analysis that helped guide the development of the You-Said-It curriculum. She has also conducted the field trials of the early versions of that system. She has used the system for training clients with articulation disorders and those with syntactic/pragmatic language deficits. Feedback from Doreen about client usage of the system keeps the designers designing and the programmers programming.