Dr. Jerome R. Bellegarda

Over the past decade, the confluence of sophisticated algorithms and tools, computational infrastructure, and data science has fueled a machine learning revolution across multiple fields, including speech and handwriting recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, social network filtering, and machine translation. Ensuing advances are changing the way we interact with technology in our daily lives. This is particularly salient when it comes to user input on mobile devices, be it speech, handwriting, touch, keyboard, or camera input. Increased input intelligence boosts device responsiveness across languages, improving not only basic abilities like tokenization, named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging, but also more advanced capabilities like statistical language modeling and question answering. In this talk, I will give selected examples of what Apple has been doing to impart input intelligence to mobile devices, with two overarching themes as sub-text: (i) enhancing interaction experience through machine learning, and (ii) transforming users' digital lives without sacrificing their privacy.

Biography:

Dr. Jerome R. Bellegarda (M’87-SM’92-F’03) is Distinguished Scientist at Etsy, Inc., where he has been leading Generative Artificial Intelligence efforts across all company’s activities since 2023. Prior to working for Etsy, he led human language technologies as Distinguished Scientist at Apple Inc., Cupertino, California, for 28 years, and was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, for 7 years. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, in 1987. Among his diverse contributions to speech and language advances over the years, he pioneered the use of tied mixtures in acoustic modeling and latent semantics in language modeling, and many of the innovations he developed were integrated into successful Apple products. His general interests span machine learning applications, statistical modeling algorithms, natural language processing, man-machine communication, multiple input/output modalities, and multimedia knowledge management. In these areas he has written over 200 publications, and holds over 100 U.S. and foreign patents. He has served on many international scientific committees, review panels, and advisory boards. In particular, he has worked as Expert Advisor on speech and language technologies for both the U.S. National Science Foundation and the European Commission, served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Speech Technical Committee, was Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, and is currently an Editorial Board member for Speech Communication. He was selected as one of the 2022-2023 IEEE SPS Distinguished Industry Speakers, and is currently serving on the Awards Board of IEEE SPS. He is a Fellow of both IEEE and ISCA (International Speech Communication Association).

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