Career
He is currently the Director of Advanced Conversational Technologies at Jibo, Incorporated. He has been an active contributor to speech research and technology since 1981. He obtained a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pisa in 1980 with a thesis on the equalization of data channels.
After his graduation, between 1981 and 1989 he worked at Centro studi e laboratori telecomunicazioni (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), the then Italian telephone company"s research center, at Bell Labs (Murray Hill, New Jersey) between 1990 and 1995, and American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs (Florham Park, New Jersey) between 1995 and 1999.
In 1999 he was Director of the Natural Dialog group at SpeechWorks International until the company was acquired by Scansoft in 2003, and then held a position of manager for the Advanced Conversational Technologies department at International Business Machines Corporation Research (Thomas J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York) from 2003 and 2005. He served as the Chief Technology Officer at SpeechCycle from 2005 to 2011.
Between 2012 and 2013 he was the Chief Executive Officer of the International Computer Science Institute. He was the elected Chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) between 2007 and 2008, and on the board of several international conferences and events.
He was also the general co-chair of the SIGdial Conference on Dialog and Discourse, held in London on September 2009, and the general technical program chair of Interspeech 2011 held in Florence, Italy, on August 2011.
During his career he authored more than 120 articles, book chapters, and conference publications in the fields of speech recognition, language modeling, optical character recognition, and dialog systems He was elevated to the grade of Fellow by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2010 for contributions to statistical natural language understanding and spoken dialog management and learning. He is the author of "The Voice in the Machine, " published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press in 2011, a general audience book on the history, technology, and the business of computers that understand speech.