Nelson Morgan


Professor Nelson Morgan is the former director of the International Computer Science Institute, where he was also the Speech Group leader. He is also a professor in residence of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He recently co-founded UpRise Campaigns, a California Social Purpose Corporation focused on campaign reform through empowering volunteerism.
Morgan was born in 1949 and received his PhD as an NSF fellow from UC Berkeley in 1980. He founded ICSI's Realization Group, which later become known as the Speech Group, in 1988. He served as director of ICSI from 1999 through 2011.
He is the co-inventor of the Relative Spectral approach to speech signal processing, first described in a technical report published in 1991.
In 1993, Morgan and Herve Bourlard published their work on the hybrid system approach to speech recognition, which uses neural networks probabilistically with Hidden Markov Models. The system improved automatic speech recognition techniques based on HMMs by providing discriminative training, incorporating multiple input sources, and using a flexible architecture able to accommodate contextual inputs and feedbacks. The work has been described as "seminal.". Morgan won the 1996 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for a paper with Bourlard.
Morgan was the principal investigator of the IARPA-funded project Outing Unfortunate Characteristics of HMMs, which sought to identify problems in automatic speech recognition technology. He also led a team of universities to build speech recognition systems for low resource languages as part of the IARPA Babel program.
He has more than 200 publications, including four books., He is a fellow of the IEEE and the International Speech Communication Association. He is on the editorial board of Speech Communication Magazine, of which he is a former co-editor-in-chief.