Stephen E. Levinson (September 27, 1944, New York City) is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), leader of the Language Acquisition and Robotics Lab at UIUC, and a full-time faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC. He works on speech synthesis, acquisition and recognition and the development of anthropomorphic robots.

Stephen E. Levinson
Born (1944-09-27) September 27, 1944 (age 79)
Alma materUniversity of Rhode Island, Harvard University
Scientific career
FieldsRobotics and language
InstitutionsUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
External videos
video icon 60-Second Science: Stephen Levinson on Artificial Intelligence and Language, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
video icon Teaching Bert: iCub Robot Learns About the World, Stephen Levinson, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

Early life and education edit

Stephen E. Levinson was born on September 27, 1944 in New York City. He earned a B. A. degree in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University in 1966. He earned his M. S. (1972) and Ph.D. (1974) degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, Rhode Island.[1]

Career edit

Levinson worked as a design engineer at General Dynamics from 1966-1969, after completing his bachelor's degree, and as an instructor in computer science at Yale University from 1974-1976, after completing his Ph.D.[1]

In 1976, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There he studied speech recognition and understanding. He was a visiting researcher at the NTT Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan in 1979, and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University in 1984.[1] In 1990, Levinson was appointed head of Linguistics Research at Bell Labs. He directed research on speech synthesis, speech recognition and the translation of spoken language.[1]

In 1997, Levinson moved to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he leads the Language Acquisition and Robotics Lab.[2] His areas of teaching and research include speech and language processing, speech synthesis, and language acquisition. Levinson is developing computational models of the brain, mind, and language acquisition using an iCub humanoid robot. The robot is designed to learn through experience, similar to the way in which a human child might learn.[2][3] Levinson is the first researcher in North American to work with this type of robot, which was designed in Europe. Skills that researchers hope to teach the robot include juggling, walking, talking, and memory formation.[4]

Levinson has published more than 100 technical papers and holds several patents.[1] He is a founding editor of the journal Computer Speech and Language, and an editor of the journal Speech Technology.[5] Among others books, Levinson is the author of Mathematical Models for Speech Technology (2005)[6] and co-author of Autonomous Robotics and Deep Learning (2014)[7] and Autonomous Military Robotics (2014).[8]

Awards and honors edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c d e Levinson, Stephen (2007). Articulatory speech synthesis from the fluid dynamics of the vocal apparatus. San Rafael: Morgan & Claypool. ISBN 9781598291780. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
  2. ^ a b Peterson, Doug (April 3, 2015). "Osuagwu's research with iCub robot focuses on language learning". ECE ILLINOIS News. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
  3. ^ Johnson, Charlie (December 18, 2009). "Levinson works to create artificially intelligent robots". ECE ILLINOIS News. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
  4. ^ "Humanoid Robot Learns Like a Child". Discovery News. Retrieved February 11, 2013.
  5. ^ a b c Roe, David B.; Wilpon, Jay G. (1994). Voice communication between humans and machines. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. p. 519. ISBN 0-309-04988-1. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
  6. ^ McTear, Michael; Callejas, Zoraida; Griol, David (May 19, 2016). The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices. Springer. pp. 90, 92. ISBN 9783319329659.
  7. ^ Nath, Vishnu; Levinson, Stephen E. (2014). Autonomous robotics and deep learning. [S.l.]: Springer International Pu. ISBN 9783319056029.
  8. ^ Nath, Vishnu; Levinson, Stephen E. (2014). Autonomous military robotics. Cham: Springer. ISBN 9783319056050.
  9. ^ a b "Stephen E. Levinson". ECE Illinois. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
  10. ^ "IEEE Fellows 1986 | IEEE Communications Society".
  11. ^ Waibel, Alex; Lee, Kai-Fu (1990). Readings in speech recognition. San Mateo, Calif.: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. p. 153. ISBN 1558601244. Retrieved 29 December 2017.