About Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Jan Niehues is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering at Maastricht University, having previously earned his doctoral degree from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2014, focusing on "Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation." His research spans various aspects of Machine Translation and Spoken Language Translation, and he has contributed to several international projects, including the German-French Quaero project and the EU H2020 projects QT21 and Elitr. Jan has also been involved in organizing the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) and has conducted research at esteemed institutions such as KIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and LIMSI/CNRS in Paris.

Alexander Waibel is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at both Carnegie Mellon University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he directs the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies. Renowned for his groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, multimodal interfaces, and speech translation systems, Waibel developed early neural network-based systems, including the Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN), which was the first convolutional neural network. His innovations have led to the creation of various multimodal interfaces and cross-lingual communication systems, such as the first consecutive and simultaneous speech translation systems. Waibel has founded over ten companies to translate academic research into practical applications, including Jibbigo, the first mobile speech translator. With approximately 1,000 publications and numerous awards, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Germany and a Fellow of the IEEE, holding degrees from MIT and CMU.