Biing-Hwang (Fred) Juang


Biing Hwang "Fred" Juang is a communication and information scientist, best known for his work in speech coding, speech recognition and acoustic signal processing. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002 as Motorola Foundation Chair Professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering.

Life and career

He earned his education at University of California, Santa Barbara. He did research on vocal tract modeling at Speech Communications Research Laboratory with Hisashi Wakita and then joined Signal Technology, Inc. in 1979, while still a Ph.D. student at UCSB, to work on a number of Government-sponsored research projects. In 1982, he moved to the U.S. east coast to join Bell Laboratories. His work includes development of vector quantization for voice applications, voice coders at extremely low bit rates, robust vocoders for satellite communications, fundamental algorithms in signal modeling for automatic speech recognition, hidden Markov models, segmental clustering algorithms, discriminative methods in pattern recognition and machine learning, stereo- and multi-phonic teleconferencing, and a number of voice-enabled interactive communication services. Aside from various algorithms that are in widespread use today, he is also accredited with the conceptual breakthrough of direct error minimization for pattern recognition, which substantially augments the century-old methodology of Thomas Bayes' distribution estimation approach. He was Director of Acoustics and Speech Research at Bell Labs in late 1990s. He joined Georgia Tech in 2002.

Awards and recognitions