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.
Aravind Ganapathiraju is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. He received his B.S. from REC, Trichy, India in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 1995 and his M.S. in Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University in 1997. He currently leads the Core Speech Technology team developing a state-of-the-art public-domain speech recognition system. Mr. Ganapathiraju’s research interests lie in the development of discriminative algorithms for better acoustic modeling. He has previously worked on syllable-based speech recognition systems. Mr. Ganapathiraju is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and is a student member of the IEEE.
Mr. Hamaker is a Barrier Fellow and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. He received his B.S.E.E in 1977 and his M.S.E.E. in 2000, both from Mississippi State University. He currently leads a software engineering team developing a public domain speech recognition system. His current research involves acoustic modeling for LVCSR. He has spent two summer internships at Microsoft Inc. He has previously led the development of a large corpora in English and Japanese, and has developed Java-based educational tools for visualization of signal processing concepts. Mr. Hamaker is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and a student member of the IEEE.

Mark L. Ordowski received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University in 1991 and a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in 1994. He currently is pursuing a PhD at the Center for Language and Speech Processing, The Johns Hopkins University and is a Senior Research Engineer for a Speech Recognition Laboratory at the Department of Defense.

George R. Doddington received a BSEE degree from U. Florida in 1964, an MSEE from U. Wisconsin in 1967, and a Ph.D. from U. Wisconsin in 1970. He was a Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments where he directed many commercially successful speech-related projects including Speak&Spell, the first operational speech recognition system for use in military aircraft, and speech recognition and verification technology for use in long‑distance calling card services. From 1993-94, he served as a program manager for DARPA’s Human Language Technology program. Dr. Doddington is currently a Senior Principal Scientist at SRI International, where he is a language technology advisor for NIST, providing research direction for the US government language R&D programs.