Alex Waibel

Alexander Waibel (born 2 May 1956 in Heidelberg, Germany) is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Waibel's research interests focus on speech recognition and translation and human communication signals and systems.

Alex Waibel made pioneering contributions to speech translation systems, breaking down language barriers through cross-lingual speech communication.

In fundamental research on machine learning, he is known for the Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN), the first Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained by gradient descent, using backpropagation.

Alex Waibel introduced the TDNN 1987 at ATR in Japan.

The BBC quoted Alex Waibel on his motivation: "We don’t want to look things up in dictionaries – so I wanted to build a machine to translate speech."

Alex Waibel graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, with an MS and PhD in computer science.

Waibel is the director of interACT, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies.

Alex Waibel is a recipient of the IEEE Senior Best Paper Award for work on the TDNN (1990).

He was awarded the Alcatel-SEL "Forschungspreis Technische Kommunikation" in 1994 for his work on computer speech translation systems.

He was one of the founders of C-STAR, an international consortium for speech translation research, and served as its chairman from 1998 to 2000.

In 2002, he received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence and the

In 2003, C-STAR turned into IWSLT, the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation.

Waibel served as Chairman of its Steering Committee since inception.

Meta Prize in 2011 with Jibbigo Mobile Translators for outstanding mobile voice translators bringing speech translation to mobile devices.

He directed and coordinated several multisite research programs in the US and Waibel directed, including the CHIL program (FP-6 Integrated Project on multimodality) in Europe and NSF-ITR project STR-DUST (the first domain independent speech translation project) in the U.S. He was project coordinator of the IP EU-BRIDGE, funded by the EC (2012-2014).

At C-STAR, his team developed the JANUS speech translation system, the first American and European Speech Translation system, and more recently the first real-time simultaneous speech translation system for lectures.

His lab has also developed several multimodal systems including perceptual meeting rooms, meeting recognizers, meeting browsers, and multimodal dialog systems for humanoid robots.

In the areas of speech, speech translation, and multimodal interfaces Waibel holds several patents and has founded and co-founded several successful commercial ventures.

He is the founder and chairman of Mobile Technologies, LLC, maker of the Jibbigo mobile speech-to-speech translation app which uses speech recognition and machine translation.

In 2012, Waibel produced a video lecture demonstrating the world's first automatic simultaneous translation service at a university, stating that "the lecture translator automatically records, transcribes and translates the speech of a lecturer in real-time, and students can follow the lecture in their language on their PC or mobile phone."

In 2013, Jibbigo was acquired by Facebook Inc. and Waibel joined the company to start the Language Technology Group which would eventually become part of Facebook's broader Applied Machine Learning efforts.

He is a director at Multimodal Technologies, Inc.

In 2014, he was the recipient of the Antonio Zampolli Prize for “outstanding contributions to the advancement of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation within Human Language Technology”, LREC.

In 2015, he cofounded KITES GmbH, to deliver simultaneous speech translation services to Universities and to the European Parliament.

KITES was acquired by Zoom in 2021 and now delivers automatic subtitling and simultaneous translation during Zoom video conferencing calls.

Waibel serves as Research Fellow at Zoom and on Advisory Boards in related enterprises.

With InterACT, he was awarded a second Meta Prize for “Outstanding and Innovative Contributions to Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Communication Technologies” (2016).

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Germany, Leopoldina since 2017.

In 2023, Waibel was inducted as Fellow into the Explorers Club citing aviation expeditions and deep sea exploration.

In October 2018, Waibel closed out a successful legal case against Wikimedia Foundation citing German libel laws.

From 2019 to 2023, he directed OML (Organic Machine Learning) funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany), a fundamental research project to develop incremental and interactive machine learning, aiming to help AI better handle surprise in language and robotics.

He received the Life-Time Achievement Award of the ACM-ICMI for his work on multimodal interfaces (2019).

In 2023, he became the 21st honoree to receive the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award for "pioneering work on speech translation and supporting technologies".