ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Richard Wiggins has contributed to speech and signal processing
research for 25 years. He made original contributions to the
development of low-bit-rate voice coding algorithms, contributed to
the design of integrated circuits for speech synthesis and DSP
processing, lead teams developing new speech processing applications,
and built and managed corporate R&D organizations. After receiving a
BS degree in mathematics from Louisiana State University, he worked
for several years at the National Security Agency. During this time,
he was awarded a DOD fellowship for graduate study at American
University in Washington, D.C. where he earned an MS in mathematics.
He joined the MITRE Corporation in 1966 and attended Harvard
University as a MITRE Staff Scholar. After receiving his doctorate in
applied mathematics, he conducted research at MITRE in narrow band
voice coding for secure communications, designed speech analysis and
synthesis algorithms using linear predictive coding (LPC) techniques,
and developed an interest in performance measures for voice coding
algorithms.
Shortly after joining the Central Research Laboratories at Texas
Instruments (TI) in 1976, Dr. Wiggins developed the speech analysis
and synthesis system for the Speak & Spell TM learning aid. From 1982
until 1984 he was Director of Speech Technology at Commodore Business
Machines responsible for speech product and software development. He
returned to TI in 1984 and managed various speech technology groups in
the Corporate Research organization developing advanced applications
in voice recognition and telephone-based speech processing
applications. During his 12 years as a research director, in addition
to his activities in speech processing, Dr. Wiggins established
several new research programs in image processing, multimedia
technology, software research, and DSP system design. Dr. Wiggins
recently retired from TI.
In 1993, Dr. Wiggins was awarded the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer
Electronics Field Award for "pioneering contributions to consumer
electronics products employing synthetic speech for education and
entertainment." The techniques Dr. Wiggins developed allowed the
computationally demanding task of generating high quality speech using
LPC synthesis to be achieved with a single integrated circuit. This
was a major breakthrough because it reduced the cost of LPC
synthesizers several orders of magnitude making feasible their use in
consumer products. This innovation gave rise to talking learning aids
for children, communicative aids for the vocally impaired, and
speaking products for education and entertainment. Dr. Wiggins also
developed voice-processing procedures, which have made possible larger
vocabularies and better speech quality in talking electronic products.
In addition, he contributed to the initial design, architecture, and
application of TI's original DSP, the TMS320.
Dr. Wiggins has published numerous technical papers and has been
awarded 17 patents. He has served as program, session, and conference
chairman at various technical conferences and was founding editor of
Speech Technology Magazine. He has served on industrial advisory
boards for university research centers at the University of Maryland,
the University of Texas at Dallas, Rutgers University, and for the
National Science Foundation.