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Li Deng Receives Outstanding Engineer Award
UW Electrical Engineering Affiliate Professor Li Deng received an IEEE Region 6 Outstanding Engineer Award for his contributions to deep machine learning and neural networks with applications to speech and language processing.
“This award recognizes the achievement of deep learning and the science of big data in industry-scale tasks such as speech recognition that took place in our Northwest region in recent years,” said Deng, who accepted the award at the IEEE Seattle 110th Anniversary Gala on October 19.
Deng, a Principal Research Manager of the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft Research, teaches a graduate course on Computer Speech Processing. Deng’s technical work and leadership in industry-scale deep learning has greatly impacted speech recognition and areas of information processing and is used in major Microsoft speech products and in several text and data related products.
In 2009, Deng worked with Professor Geoffrey Hinton to pioneer the application of deep neural network and other deep learning methods to speech analysis and recognition. They discovered that deep learning produces significantly better results than then-prevailing statistical methods.
“Since then, with rapidly growing amounts of data to support learning of bigger and bigger models, deep learning took off in industry as well as in academia like wildfire,” Deng said. “The landscape of speech recognition and related fields has been undergoing fundamental changes.”
Deng was the recipient of the 2013 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award, Microsoft Goldstar Awards and Technology Transfer Awards. He has published more than 300 papers in leading journals and conferences and authored or co-authored five books. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association. He has been granted more than 70 U.S. or international patents in acoustics/audio, speech/language technology, large-scale data analysis and machine learning.
