Joseph Picone received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1983. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University, where he also directs the Institute for Signal and Information Processing. He has previously been employed by Texas Instruments and AT&T Bell Laboratories. His primary research interest currently is the development of public domain speech recognition technology. Dr. Picone is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a registered Professional Engineer. He has also served in several capacities with the IEEE, including an associate editor of this journal. Dr. Picone has published more than 90 papers in the area of speech processing and has been awarded 8 patents.

Jonathan Hamaker is a Barrier Fellow and Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Mississippi State University in 1997 and 1999 respectively. He leads the Internet-Accessible Speech Technology Group which focuses on developing public-domain DSP tools and technology which are available via web interfaces. Mr. Hamaker's research interests lie in the development of robust acoustic models for large vocabulary conversational speech recognition. He has also recently completed an internship with Microsoft Corp. where he worked on the development of noise-robust solutions for speech recognition. Mr. Hamaker is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and is a student member of the IEEE.

Robert M. Brown, Jr. was born in 1974. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering, with an emphasis on communications, from Mississippi State University in 1998. From Sept. 1998 to April 1999, he worked for the Institute for Signal and Information Processing developing educational applets using the Java language. Since April 1999, he has worked at Digidesign, Inc. as a software engineer. His fields of interest are digital audio and acoustics. Previous research has included the development of linear discriminant analysis to help determine the scenic quality of forest images, and software to detect and remove acoustical feedback from a digital audio source. Mr. Brown is a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Audio Engineering Society.

Ron Cole is a Research Professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is Director of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology. He received his B.A in Psychology in 1967 from the University of Rochester, his Master of Arts from the University of California Riverside in Psychology in 1969 and his Doctorate from UC Riverside in Psychology in 1971. His primary research interest is the development of interactive language technologies for classroom learning. Professor Cole has been actively involved in the study of speech for the past 25 years, resulting in over 100 published articles in books, scientific journals and conference proceedings.

Dr. John H.L. Hansen is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He holds appointments in both the Departments of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He serves as Associate Director for The Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU), and Director of research activities of the Robust Speech Processing Lab (RSPL) at CSLU. He received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1988 and 1983, and the B.S.E.E. degree from Rutgers University in 1982. He is the author of more than 110 peer reviewed journal and conference papers, and is coauthor of the textbook "Discrete-Time Processing of Speech Signals," (Prentice-Hall, 1993; IEEE Press 1999).