Giuseppe Riccardi

Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi, PhD, is founder and director of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab at University of Trento, Italy.

Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi is founder and director of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab at 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/Politechnic 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 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 ranked first in the 1994 DARPA ATIS evaluation. He and his colleagues pioneered the 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 lead to the creation of the first large scale finite state chain decoding for machine translation ( Anuvaad ). He lead University of Trento’s team that contributed to the IBM WATSON machine that won the Jeopardy! challenge.
Prof. Riccardi has co-authored more than 220 scientific papers. He holds more than 90 patents in the artificial intelligence and machine learning area and specifically in automatic speech recognition, understanding, machine translation, natural language processing and active learning. His current 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 has co-organized the IEEE ASRU Conference in 1993, 1999, 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 been a co-founder and Editorial Board member of the ACM Transactions of Speech and Language Processing. He has been elected member of the IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee (2005-2008). He is member of ACL, ACM and elected Fellow of IEEE (2010) and of ISCA (2017).
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.