Giuseppe Riccardi

Academic Positions

2018-Present Full Professor in Computer Science and Information Engineering,  Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, University of Trento.

2005-2018 Associate Professor in Computer Science and Information Engineering,  Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, University of Trento.

Didattica:

• Programmazione 1 (12 Crediti, Sito Web)  - Bachelor Computer Engineering ( In Italiano )
• Natural Language Understanding  (6 Crediti, Sito Web) -  Master   Artificial Intelligence Systems ( in English )
• Human-Machine Dialogue (6 Crediti,  Sito Web) -  Master  Artificial Intelligence Systems ( in English )

Founder and director of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab. The research interests are in the areas of

• Analysis and interpretation of language in its diverse forms ( spoken, written, multimodal )
• Analysis and interpretation of  physiological signals.
• Human-machine dialogue systems
• Machine learning applied to natural language processing and human-machine interaction

Web site of the research lab

• 2019 ISCA award for papers published in (2014-2018) in the Computer Speech and Language Journal

• 2017 ISCA Fellow ("For contributions to language modeling, spoken language understanding and dialogue systems")

• 2016 Amazon Alexa Award

• 2011 IBM Open Collaborative Faculty Award

• 2010 IBM Open Collaborative Faculty Award

• 2010 IEEE Fellow ( "For contributions to algorithms for automatic speech recognition and spoken language processing")

• 2009 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award per l'articolo "Active Learning: Theory and Applications to Automatic Speech Recognition".

• 2006-2010 Marie Curie Excellence Leader, European Commission ( predecessor of the ERC Starting Grant)

• 2005-2008 Elected member of IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee

• 2004 IEEE Senior Member

• 2003 "Most Innovative Speech Solution", Conferenza SpeechTek

• 2002 AT&T Research Excellence Award, USA

• 2001 AT&T Software Excellence Award, USA

• 2001 AT&T Research Excellence Award, USA

• 1994 Bell Labs President Award, USA

Biography

Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi is the founder and director of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab at the University of Trento, Italy. He received his Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering and Master in Information Technology in 1991 from the University of Padua and CEFRIEL/Polytechnic of Milan (Italy), respectively. From 1990 to 1993, he collaborated with Alcatel-Telettra Research Laboratories (Italy). In 1995 he received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Padua, Italy. From 1993 to 2005, he was at AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA) and then AT&T Labs-Research (USA), where he worked in the Speech and Language Processing Lab. In 2005 he joined the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento (Italy).
Prof. Riccardi's research on stochastic finite state machines for speech and language processing has been applied to a wide range of domains for task automation. He and his colleagues designed the AT&T spoken language system, which ranked first in the 1994 DARPA ATIS evaluation. He and his colleagues pioneered speech and language research in spontaneous speech for the well-known "How May I Help You?" research program, which led to breakthrough speech services. His research on learning finite state automata and transducers has led to the creation of the first large-scale finite state chain decoding for machine translation ( Anuvaad ). He led the University of Trento’s team that contributed to the IBM WATSON machine that won the Jeopardy! challenge.
Prof. Riccardi has co-authored more than 240 scientific papers. He holds more than 90 patents in the artificial intelligence and machine learning area, specifically in automatic speech recognition, understanding, machine translation, natural language processing, and active learning. His research interests are natural language modeling and understanding, spoken/multimodal dialogue, affective computing, machine learning, and social computing.
Prof. Riccardi has been on the scientific committee of conferences covering the science and engineering of speech and language research (INTERSPEECH, ICASSP, EMNLP, ACL). He co-organized the IEEE ASRU Conference in 1993, 1999, and 2001 and was the General Chair in 2009.  He has been the Guest Editor of the IEEE Special Issue on Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation. He has co-founded the ACM Transactions of Speech and Language Processing. He has been elected a member of the IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee (2005-2008). He is a member of ACL and ACM and was elected Fellow of IEEE (2010), ISCA (2017), and AAIA (2023 ).
Prof. Riccardi has received many national and international awards, including the Marie Curie Excellence Grant (predecessor of the ERC Starting Grant ) by the European Commission, IEEE SPS Best Paper Award, IBM Faculty Award, and AMAZON Alexa award.