According to IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, “Senior Membership is an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession”.

“It’s an honor for me to receive such a recognition from IEEE. The area of human language technologies and speech processing, in which I have been involved for more than 15 years, presents very interesting challenges and applications. I hope this recognition can contribute to promote this area among students, among the local scientific community and also to promote the work we do in INESC-ID and Técnico. I’m very happy to be able to continue contributing every day”, mentioned Alberto Abad.

A recognition to the researcher of his peers for technical and professional excellence.

Alberto Abad is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and researcher at INESC-ID. He is the coordinator of the Human Language Technologies laboratory at INESC-ID and the executive coordinator of the scientific area of Programming Methodology and Technology at DEI. He is also an ISCA member and he has been recently elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior member in recognition for his significant contributions.

Alberto Abad has developed his research career in the area of human language technologies for more than 15 years. His research interests include robust speech recognition, speaker and language characterization, applied machine learning, health-care applications, and privacy-preserving speech processing and machine learning.

During these years, Alberto Abad has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences and scientific journals of the field. He has been Principal Investigator of FCT funded project VITHEA and INESC-ID representative in the DIRHA European project, Biovisualspeech CMU-Portugal project, and TAPAS ITN. He has also been team member in various Spanish and Portuguese national and international projects, and team leader in international technological evaluation challenges achieving excellent results. He has supervised and co-supervised more than 20 MSc thesis and 1 PhD thesis and lectured in courses at both Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and IST on a variety of topics, including signal processing, machine learning, programming principles, object oriented programming and compilers. Alberto Abad has been actively involved in research community activities, including conference organization, and closely collaborated with local industry and start-up companies.