Prof. Alberto Abad, assistant professor at IST Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) and senior researcher at INESC-ID, was elected Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology, comprising more than 400 thousand professionals, in nearly 150 countries.
“It is an honour and a privilege to be elected a IEEE senior member. I have been working in the field of language technologies for more than 15 years, namely speech processing. I feel grateful to be recognised by my peers”, says the Técnico professor. “This is area raises very interesting challenges and applications that have a long-standing tradition at Técnico. In this sense, I hope that this recognition will also serve to give greater visibility to this field of knowledge and to attract new students and researchers”, adds professor Alberto Abad.
Candidates to IEEE Senior Members shall have been in professional practice for at least ten years and have at least 5 years of significant technical or professional performance.
As stated by the Chair of the IEEE Admission and Advancement Committee “the grade of senior member is an honour bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession”. Only about one in ten IEEE members holds this prestigious grade.
Professor Alberto Abad is also the executive coordinator of the Methodology and Programming Technologies scientific area at DEI and he is the coordinator of INESC-ID’s Human Language Technology Lab.
He owns a consolidated research career in the area of human language technologies. His current research interests include robust speech recognition, speaker and language characterization, applied machine learning, health-care applications, and privacy-preserving speech processing and machine learning.
Professor Alberto Abad has co-authored more than 100 publications in high-level conferences and scientific journals. He has been involved in several national and international projects. He supervised and co-supervised more than 20 master’s theses and 1 doctoral thesis. The INESC-ID researcher has been actively involved in various activities of the scientific community, including the organization of conferences, and has been working closely with the local industry and several startups.
