Alex Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the University of Karlsruhe ( Germany). He directs interACT, the international Center for Advanced Communication Technologies at both Universities with research emphasis in speech recognition, language processing, speech translation, multimodal and perceptual user interfaces. At Carnegie Mellon, he also serves as Associate Director of the Language Technologies Institute and holds joint appointments in the Human Computer Interaction Institute and the Computer Science Department.

Dr. Waibel was one of the founders of C-STAR, the international consortium for speech translation research and served as its chairman from 1998-2000. His team has developed the JANUS speech translation system, the first American and European Speech Translation system, and a number of multimodal systems including the perceptual Meeting Room, the Meeting recognizer and Meeting Browser. He currently directs CHIL program (the largest FP-6 Integrated Project on multimodality) in Europe and the NSF-ITR project STR-DUST in the US.

Dr. Waibel received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 and 1986. His work on the Time Delay Neural Networks was awarded the IEEE best paper award in 1990. His contributions to multilingual and speech translation systems was awarded the "Alcatel SEL Research Prize for Technical Communication" in 1994, the "Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence" from CMU in 2002, and the Speech Communication Best Paper Award in 2002.