Abeer A.H. Alwan

Room 66-147E Engr. IV
Department of Electrical Engineering, UCLA
Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory
Box 951594, 405 Hilgard Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1594
phone: (310) 206-2231, (310) 206-4304 (secretary)
(310) 206-4685 (dept. fax)
email: alwan@icsl.ucla.edu

Research Interests:

Speech processing: modeling speech production and perception mechanisms with applications to speech synthesis, recognition by machine, speech coding, and hearing aids.

Experience:

University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Electrical Engineering
1992-1996, Assistant Professor
1996-present, Associate Professor

Courses:
Digital Signal Processing (EE113)
Digital Speech Processing (EE214A)
Digital Signal Processing Laboratory (EE113L)
Intro. to Speech and Image Processing (EE114)
Automatic Speech Recognition (A Short Course offered by the UCLA Extension School)


Check out our Signal Processing and Communications Seminar Series

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
1987-1990
Teaching Assistant for graduate and undergraduate courses on Stochastic Processes, Detection, and Estimation; Acoustics; Signals and Systems; and Introduction to Electronics.

Digital Equipment Corporation, Northboro, MA
1990
Worked on several projects aimed at improving `DECTALK' which is a commercial text-to-speech synthesizer. The projects involved both the English and Spanish languages.

Awards:

Okawa Foundation Award in Telecommunications, 1997
NSF Career Development Award, 1995
UCLA-TRW Excellence in Teaching Award, 1994
NIH FIRST Award, 1994
NSF Research Initiation Award, 1993

UCLA Committees:

Chair, Field Committee: Signal Processing, since 1/96
Member, Courses and Curriculum Committee, since 1/96
Member, Undergraduate Reform Committee, since 1/97
Chair, Microsoft Scholarship Committee, since 96
Member of the School of Engineering Faculty Advisory Committee on Biomedical Engineering, since 1/97

Professional Affiliations and Activities:

Member: the IEEE Signal Processing Society; ASA; SWE; Eta Kappa Nu; Sigma Xi; Tau Beta Pi; AAAS
Elected Member, Technical Committee on Speech Communication, Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Elected Member, Technical Committee on Audio and Electroacoustics, IEEE Signal Processing Society
Elected Member, Technical Committee on Speech Processing, IEEE Signal Processing Society
Elected Member, New York Academy of Sciences
Technical Program Committee Member, Int. Symp. Sig. Sys. and Elec. (ISSSE), Oct. 1995
Technical Program Co-Chair of the second IEEE workshop on Multimedia, Redondo Beach, December 1998. Co-editor of the workshop proceedings
Invited lecturer at the International Summer School Course on Speech Processing, Recognition, and Artificial Neural Networks. Sponsored by the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Salerno, Italy, Oct. 1998
Technical Program Committee Member, 1996 Int. Conf. Motor Speech
Chair of a session on ``Microphone Arrays and Hearing Aids'' at the IEEE Int. Con. Acous. Speech Sig. Proc. (ICASSP) 1998
Co-chair of a session on "Robust Speech Recognition" at the third joint ASA-ASJ (Acous. Soc. Amer.-Acous. Soc. Japan) meeting, December 1996
Faculty Advisor to the Society of Women Engineers, UCLA Chapter

Editorial Services to Scholarly Publications:

Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing; IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing; IEEE Mohonk Workshop on Audio and Electroacoustics; IEEE ICASSP; Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; Speech Communication; Journal of Phonetics

Other Professional Activities

Reviewer of Technical Proposals: NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate: Microelectronic Information Processing Systems (MIPS) and the Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) programs
Workshop Organizer and Leader at Hughes Research Laboratories Symposium, El Segundo, January, 1997
Invited Participant at NSF panels (CISE and EHR Directorates), Arlington, VA
Invited Talk, Asilomar Conf. on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Monterey, Fall 1997
Invited Speaker, WESCOM, Anaheim, Fall 1996
Invited Speaker, the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), Seattle, November 1996
Invited Talks, the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Philadelphia, October 1996
Invited Participant in a NIH-NIDCD (National Institute on Deafness and other Communications Disorders) panel, Virginia, 1996
Invited Keynote Speaker at the Joint Voice Foundation 25th Symposium and the International Symposium on Phonosurgery, Philadelphia, June 1996
Invited Talk at the SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering) Medical Imaging Conference, Newport Beach, February 1996
Invited Panelist at a COSEPUP meeting (Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Institute of Medicine), Beckman Institute, Irvine, February 1996
Invited Talk, ISSSE, San Francisco, Fall 1995


last modified: April 11th, 1999