Biography:Gerald Penn (computer scientist)

Short description: American computer scientist

Gerald Penn
Penn at IZ-Colloquium (Berlin, May 2012)
Alma mater	University of Chicago (BS) Carnegie Mellon University (MS, PhD)
Known for	Application of neural network in acoustic model
Awards	E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize (2001) Beckman Fellow (2006)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematical linguistics Computational linguistics Natural language processing Speech recognition Parsing
Institutions	University of Toronto
Thesis	The Algebraic Structure of Attributed Type Signatures (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Frank Pfenning
Website	http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gpenn/

Gerald Penn is an American computer scientist specializing in mathematical linguistics and speech processing. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a senior member of IEEE and AAAI, and a past chair of Association for Mathematics of Language.

Education

Penn earned a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1991. He then attained a M.Sc. in philosophy in 1993 and Ph.D. in computer science in 2000, both from Carnegie Mellon University. His Ph.D. thesis was nominated by Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Career

Penn is a past recipient of the Ontario Early Researcher Award. His joint work with Geoffrey Hinton and Hui Jiang on signal processing with neural networks revolutionized acoustic modelling for speech recognition systems, and received the Best Paper Award from IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has led numerous research projects, including those funded by Avaya, Bell Canada, CAE, the Connaught Fund, Microsoft, NSERC, the German Ministry for Training and Research, SMART Technologies, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.