Janet Baker Email & Phone Number

Selected Projects:2012-Present MIT Media Lab, Research Affiliate2011 - PresentExpert Evaluator for Technical Institutes/Programs for Governments of Croatia, Romania, Spain, etc.Harvard Medical School, MEEI, Lecturer, ~2001-2011January, 2008 - MGH, Harvard/MIT HST/UCSD, BU, etc. Collaborations, applying novel analysis and machine learning approaches to cortical processing of info incl. speech, language, etc.November 2006 - 2009 Leader: SRU Working Group for Future Directions for Human Language Technology Project for U.S. Government's Disruptive Technology Office (DTO), focusing on "Grand Challenges" in Machine Translation, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Resources, and Speech Understanding (MINDS)January 2005 - 2007MIT Dibner Institute, History of Science and Technology, Visiting ScholarDir. HSLT Project MIT Museum, Res. Affiliate2005 - PresentFounder/Chair of Saras Institute, a small non-profit 501(c)3 charitable corporation dedicated to the "preservation of the past and present for the benefit of the future" and community service (www.SarasInstitute.org)2007-2009IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal Selection Committee 2006Organizer; Intl. Conference on Spoken Language Processing "From Ideas to Companies" with speech company founders, and "Vintage Speech Technology Demos and Exhibits; From Radio Rex to Amazing Amanda" incl historical A/V materials and objects2005Chair "Government and Industry Funded Speech Research: Successes and Pitfalls," IEEE ASRU Workshop, San Juan, Puerto Rico.Chair "History of Speech Technology", Interspeech, Lisbon, Portugal1990 - PresentSpeaker: High Tech Business/Entrepreneurship/Innovation (Babson College/HEC, Harvard Univ., MIT Sloan, etc.)Awards:2010 Intl Speech Comm Assoc Fellow2012 IEEE James Flanagan Speech and Audio Proc Award"For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of automatic speech recognition."Inventor multiple patents issued/pending

Greater Boston Area

Dragon created the first commercial general-purpose speech dictation software, DragonDictate and Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and invented audiomining/audio-indexing, the first general-purpose search engine for information retrieval of audio materials in multiple languages, over multiple channels (e.g. microphone, telephone, and broadcast recordings). The recipient of hundreds of industry awards, Dragon Systems has been recognized worldwide for its long-term market and technology leadership. In 2000 Dragon stock was sold to Lernout&Hauspie. Dragon's assets subsequently acquired by Nuance Communications, were acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Although Dragon Systems itself no longer exists, Dragon's technology itself has been incorporated in hundreds of millions of the world's leading speech products/services, incl Apple's Siri, desktop dictation, medical dictation/transcription, audio search, automotive command, TV remotes, popular smartphone apps, etc.In addition to strategy/management responsibilities, Janet successfully negotiated numerous commercial contracts (AOL, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, etc.), oversaw Research, and served as PI and participant on many US R&D Government contracts (DARPA, Dept. of Defense, Dept. of Commerce, Dept. of Justice, NASA, etc.). Speech and language R&D technology areas spanned robust speech, speaker identification, speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken information retrieval (topic detection and tracking), spoken language identification, statistical and grammar-based natural language modeling, text-based machine translation, etc. Janet has been active internationally with ALVEY, ATR, DARPA, ESCA, ESPRIT, LDC, NIST, etc. to create large non-proprietary speech databases (e.g. WSJ), and foster rigorous performance evaluation. She's served on many scientific, technical, and advisory committees for industry/government. She has been a frequent presenter at international technical and business conferences, TED, TV/Radio, etc.

Greater Boston Area

Specializing in in telephone-based continuous speech recognition R&D for industry and government.Janet also served as Principal Investigator and a participant in US Government R&D contractsfor speaker-independent speech recognition, dialect analysis, keyword-spotting, natural language interfaces, etc.

Yorktown Heights, Ny

Performed research, working in the Continuous Speech Recognition Group on time-domain signal processing and acoustic analysis.

Ph.D., Ai/Computer Science

Time-Domain Processing for Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition, Animal Vocalizations, and Music Thesis Advisor: Raj Reddy

Biophysics, Neurophysiology

Rockefeller Advisors: H. Hartline, F. Ratliff, and D. Griffin MIT, Research Affiliate Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT.

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Biology

Advisors: N. Milburn and K. Roeder University of Tübingen, Germany Jr. Year Abroad (1967-1968) studying neurophysiology/medicine