Philip Rubin

Philip E. Rubin (born May 22, 1949) is an American cognitive scientist, technologist, and science administrator known for raising the visibility of behavioral and cognitive science, neuroscience, and ethical issues related to science, technology, and medicine, at a national level.

His research career is noted for his theoretical contributions and pioneering technological developments, starting in the 1970s, related to speech synthesis and speech production, including articulatory synthesis (computational modeling of the physiology and acoustics of speech production) and sinewave synthesis, and their use in studying complex temporal events, particularly understanding the biological bases of speech and language.

Rubin is the President and a Trustee of Rothschild Wilder, a private foundation that supports social justice and ethics, science and innovation, the arts and humanities, and the preservation of popular culture artifacts.

He is also Chair of the Board of Directors of Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is Chief Executive Officer emeritus and was for many years a senior scientist.

In addition, he is a Professor Adjunct in the Department of Surgery, Otolaryngology at the Yale University School of Medicine, a Research Affiliate in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, a Fellow at Yale's Trumbull College,

and a Trustee of the University of Connecticut.

He is the current Past President of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS), a role in which he will serve through 2025.

Starting in the early 1970s, Rubin worked on foundational issues in speech technology.

These include: participating with Rod McGuire on Haskins aspects of the ARPANET Network Voice Protocol, a predecessor of Voice over IP;

collaborating with Leonard Szubowicz, Douglas Whalen, and others on digitized speech, particularly extensions of the Haskins Pulse-code modulation (PCM) implementation,

focusing on expanding temporal markers and event labels; and working with Patrick Nye on the Digital Pattern Playback, which was eventually replaced by Rubin's Hades system.

During his time at Haskins Laboratories, Rubin was responsible for the design of many computational models and other software systems.

Most prominent are ASY, the Haskins articulatory synthesis program,

and SWS, the Haskins sinewave synthesis program, both developed in the 1970s.

ASY expanded the Mermelstein vocal-tract model developed at Bell Laboratories, adding additional articulatory control, simulation of nasal sounds, sound generation, and digital sound production.

Most importantly, Rubin designed and implemented an approach for describing and controlling articulatory events, now known as speech gestures.

In addition to use in standard articulatory synthesis, the ASY program has been used as part of a gestural-computational model that combines articulatory phonology, task dynamics, and articulatory synthesis.

With Louis Goldstein and Mark Tiede, Rubin designed a radical revision of the articulatory synthesis model, known as CASY, the configurable articulatory synthesizer.

This 3-dimensional model of the vocal tract permits researchers to replicate MRI images of actual speakers and has been used to study the relation between speech production and perception.

With colleagues Hosung Nam, Catherine Browman, Louis Goldstein, Michael Proctor, Elliot Saltzman, and Mark Tiede, a software system called TADA was developed.

It implemented the task dynamic model of inter-articulator speech coordination, incorporating also a coupled-oscillator model of inter-gestural planning, a gestural-coupling model, and portions of the Haskins articulatory model.

The system also generated articulatory models of English utterances from either phonetic or orthographic text input.

The sinewave synthesis system designed by Rubin, known as SWS, is based on a technique for synthesizing speech by replacing the formants (main bands of energy) with pure tone whistles, and was designed to explore the spatiotemporal aspects of speech signals.

It was the first sinewave synthesis system developed for the automatic, large-scale creation of stimuli for perceptual experiments, and has been used by Robert Remez, Rubin, David B. Pisoni, and other colleagues and researchers to study the time-varying characteristics of the speech signal.

Rubin is also the designer of the Hades signal processing system and the SPIEL programming language, a predecessor of MATLAB.

Philip Rubin received his BA in psychology and linguistics in 1971 from Brandeis University and subsequently attended the University of Connecticut where he received his PhD in experimental psychology in 1975 under the tutelage of Michael Turvey, Ignatius Mattingly, Philip Lieberman, and Alvin Liberman.

Philip Rubin's research spans a number of disciplines, combining computational, engineering, linguistic, physiological, and psychological approaches to study embodied cognition, most particularly the biological bases of speech and language.

He is best known for his work on articulatory synthesis (computational modeling of the physiology and acoustics of speech production), speech perception, sinewave synthesis, signal processing, perceptual organization, and theoretical approaches and modeling of complex temporal events.

At the same time, he has been involved in leadership roles related to science administration, policy, and advocacy.

From 1992 through 2012, Rubin was the core and administrative leader of Haskins Laboratories' main research activity, the National Institutes of Health/NICHD funded P-01 program project, “The Nature and Acquisition of the Speech Code and Reading.”

In 1998, he was the co-founder and first President of AVISA, the Auditory-Visual Speech Association, now part of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

He was the co-creator, with Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, of the Talking Heads website, which is no longer active.

Dynamical systems / action theory perspective on speech.

With Carol Fowler, Robert Remez, and Michael Turvey, Rubin introduced the consideration of speech in terms of a dynamical systems / action theory perspective.

Rubin's theoretical approach to perception and production, particularly in the case of speech, eschews attention to the momentary and punctate aspects of the signal, focusing not on traditional features and cues, but on spatiotemporal coordination of global aspects of the system, such as spectral coherence over long stretches of time (an approach related to current speech understanding systems, like Siri or Amazon Alexa).

Perceptual organization.

With Robert Remez and various other colleagues, he has used the technique of sinewave synthesis to explore perceptual organization.

From 2012 through Feb. 2015 he was the Principal Assistant Director for Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and led the White House's neuroscience initiative, which included the BRAIN Initiative.

He also served as the Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at OSTP.

For many years he has been involved with issues of science advocacy, education, funding, and policy.