Executive Board

President: Marie Meteer — Pryon; Brandeis University 

Dr. Marie Meteer is a Senior Research Scientist at Pryon, working on interactive applications for Augmented Intelligence. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Brandeis University, teaching speech and dialog in the Computational Linguistics Masters Program. In her 20 year tenure at BBN Technologies, she rose from Researcher to VP of Commercial Speech Solutions..  She has consulted in industries ranging from mobile application development to call center analytics and was a co-founder and VP of Speech at EveryZing, a digital media merchandising platform.

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Vice President: Thomas Schalk — SiriusXM
Tom Schalk, Ph.D., is Vice President of Voice Technology at SiriusXM, a leading provider of in-vehicle infotainment and driver assistance to global automobile manufacturers. Dr. Schalk guides research and development of multi-modal, in-vehicle, human-machine interfaces and user experiences that seek to simplify secondary driving tasks while minimizing the risk of driver distraction. Prior to SiriusXM, Dr. Schalk was the CTO of Philips Speech Processing. He has over twenty-five years of experience in the speech recognition industry. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his BSEE from the George Washington University.

 

Executive Director: William Meisel — TMA Associates

William “Bill” Meisel, PhD, is president of TMA Associates, a speech-industry consulting firm (www.tmaa.com). Meisel organizes AVIOS conferences including Conversation Interaction and Bots and Assistants. He is author of the recent book, Computer Intelligence, and an earlier book, The Software Society. Meisel began his career as a professor of EE and CS at USC. He wrote an early technical book on machine learning, Computer-Oriented Approaches to Pattern Recognition. In the 1980s, he founded and ran a speech recognition technology company, Speech Systems Inc., for a decade, after managing the Computer Science Division of a defense firm.

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Treasurer: Michael Johnston — Interactions

Michael Johnston is Director of Research and Innovation at Interactions Corporation, where the oversees the creation and application of new technology in conversational AI, dialog, and machine learning. He has over 25 years of experience in artificial intelligence and speech technology, with a focus on applications to conversational systems, multimodal interfaces, dialog analytics, and applications that combine human and artificial intelligence. Before joining Interactions, he held positions at AT&T Research, Oregon Graduate Institute, and Brandeis University, Apple, and HP. Michael holds over 60 U.S. patents, has published over 80 technical papers, and served as editor and chair of the W3C EMMA multimodal standard.

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Secretary: Emmett Coin —  ejTalk 

Emmett Coin is founder of ejTalk, where he creates and  researches new conversational tech focusing on extended, intelligent, and natural human-machine dialog tools. Coin has been working in speech technology since the 1960s at MIT with Dennis Klatt, where he investigated early ASR and TTS.  

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