Roberto Pieraccini Appointed ICSI's New Director

^{September 1, 2011}
ICSI is pleased to announce the appointment of Roberto Pieraccini to the position of director. In January, Pieraccini will succeed Nelson Morgan, who will continue to lead the Speech Group and assist Pieraccini as his deputy director. Pieraccini comes to ICSI from SpeechCycle, where he has served as chief technology officer since 2005. Before that, he was the manager of the Conversational Interaction Technology department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research in Yorktown Heights. He has authored more than 130 publications in the areas of speech recognition, spoken language understanding and dialog, multimodal interaction, standards for human-machine communication, and machine learning. He is a fellow of the IEEE and ISCA, a member of the AVIOS board, and a member of the editorial boards of several scientific and technology magazines. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Università degli Studi di Pisa in Pisa, Italy, in 1980, and has worked at CSELT, AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Shannon Laboratories, and SpeechWorks International.

Morgan has directed ICSI since 1999 and has led the Speech Group since ICSI's inauguration.