Alan W Black is a Scottish

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, known for his research on

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

. He is a professor in the

Language Technologies Institute The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is a research institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, and focuses on the area of language technologies. The institute is home to 33 faculty with the primary sch ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

.Biographical sketch
from Black's CMU web site, retrieved 2010-07-18. Black did his undergraduate studies at

Coventry University Coventry University is a Public university, public research university in Coventry, England. The origins of Coventry University can be linked to the Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry School of Design in 1843. It was known as Lancheste ...

, graduating in 1984. He earned a master's degree from the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1993. After working at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in

Kansai Science City is an unincorporated city located in the , a border region between Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara Prefectures in Kansai region, Japan. The name is commonly shortened to or . The name Keihanna is constructed by extracting a representative kanji from Kyot ...

, Japan and at the University of Edinburgh, he took a research faculty position at Carnegie Mellon in 1999. In 2008 he became a regular faculty member with tenure at CMU. Black wrote the

Festival Speech Synthesis System The Festival Speech Synthesis System is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system originally developed by Alan W. Black, Paul Taylor and Richard Caley at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh. Subs ...

at Edinburgh, and continues to develop it at Carnegie Mellon. He has also worked on

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

of speech at CMU, and is the co-founder and was chief scientist at Cepstral, a Pittsburgh-based speech translation technology company.Cepstral leadership
retrieved 2010-07-18.

References

External links

Faculty web page
at CMU * Living people Scottish computer scientists Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Carnegie Mellon University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) {{Compu-scientist-stub