Victor Zue, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and director of international relations at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is the 2012 recipient of the award Okawa Award. Zue was honored for his “pioneering and outstanding contributions to speech science and conversational spoken language systems.”
Early in his career, Zue conducted research in acoustic phonetics and phonology, codifying the acoustic manifestation of speech sounds and the phonological rules governing the implementation of pronunciation in American English. His research interests then moved towards the development of spoken language interfaces to make human-computer interactions more natural. From 1989 to 2001, he led the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, which pioneered the development of many systems that enable users to interact with computers using spoken language.
Zue’s current research interests include the area of applying human language technology to enable straightforward access to structured and unstructured information from the Internet, particularly in application areas such as education and healthcare.
Zue is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the International Speech Communication Association. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an academician of the Academia Sinica.
Presented annually by Okawa Information and Telecommunications FoundationThe Okawa Award aims to honor individuals who have made outstanding contributions to research, technological development and business in the areas of information and telecommunications. Past winners of this MIT award include Professor Tomaso Poggio.
The award includes a certificate, a gold medal and a cash prize of 10 million yen.