The Infoture Scientists behind LENA

The development of LENA has required the many talents of many people. We would like to recognize a few of the scientists who have made LENA possible:

Jill Gilkerson, Ph.D.

• Director of Child Language Research, Infoture
• Ph.D., UCLA Department of Linguistics, concentrating in language acquisition
• Established and served as director of the UCLA Infant Language Lab

Dongxin Xu, Ph.D.

• Manager of Software and Language Engineering, Infoture
• Ph.D., University of Florida, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• BBN Technologies
• National Lab of Pattern Recognition, Beijing
• Research and engineering expertise includes signal processing, speech and speaker recognition, communication, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks

Umit Yapanel, Ph.D.

• Speech Technology Engineer, Infoture, specializing in signal activity detection, speaker segmentation, speaker identification, and acoustic and language modeling
• Ph.D., University of Colorado, Boulder
• Interned at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center — Embedded Speech Recognition Group
• Developed robust speech recognition coefficients and a computationally efficient speaker normalization algorithm for embedded systems

Sharmistha Gray, Ph.D.

• Speech Technology Engineer, Infoture, specializing in analyzing children’s speech, including pre-linguistic protophones, vegetative sounds, and fixed signals
• Ph.D., University of Colorado, Boulder — Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences
• Awarded ten patents in speech recognition and telecommunication while working at Avaya

Jeffrey A. Richards, M.A.

• Statistician and Database Technician, Infoture
• Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder
• Statistics and Research Methodology Laboratory Instructor, University of Colorado, Boulder
• Statistical Consultant, University of Colorado, Boulder