Sondra Ahlén, Principal VUI Consultant/Owner, SAVIC

Sondra Ahlén is the principal consultant and owner of SAVIC, a Voice User Interface (VUI) professional services firm. Sondra improves return on investment for bilingual customer experience applications through research, design, and analytics.  Recent projects include the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce (CHCC) 2011 Language Survey and the Call Talk Call Center Latino Language Survey.

Heath Ahrens, CEO, iSpeech

Heath Ahrens is the founder and CEO of iSpeech, a text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition (ASR) provider. In 2009, Ahrens pioneered a new solution to distracted driving, DriveSafe.ly®, an award winning mobile app downloaded over 20 million times. In 2010, Heath was named to NJBIZ’s “40 under 40”. Ahrens has spoken about speech technology and distracted driving at SpeechTEK 2011, CTIA 2010, TEDx. He most recently gave the keynote address at the NJTC 2011 Regional Commercialization Conference.

John Alfano, Strategic Consultant, Pioneer ZYPR

John Alfano has a distinguished decades-long career in tech marketing, including years in positions at Apple, SGI, Alcatel and various startups. Today, John is a strategic consultant to Pioneer, with marketing and business development responsibilities for the company's new Zypr™ service, enabling developers to mashup & voice-enable Web API's on any platform.

Max Ball, Genesys

Max has been in the self service, customer care and contact center world for almost twenty years working at a variety of companies including Edify, IBM and now Genesys. Max has been at Genesys for over seven years and now serves as the company’s Director of Product Marketing responsible for their Mobile, Voice Self Service, and “Conversation Management” product lines. Max’s background includes expertise on web based banking applications and natural language text interpretation software, he is a graduate of Stanford University

Srinivas Bangalore, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs

Srinivas Bangalore is a Principal Member of Technical Staff with over 20 years of research experience in Speech and Natural Language Processing technology. He is a co-author of a book on natural language processing, has published over 120 refereed papers, and have over 40 patents. He has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is a senior member of IEEE.

Sara Basson, Worldwide Program Director - Services Innovation Lab, IBM and Sachin Gupta, IBM Research-India, Business Development Executive

Sara Basson works in IBM Research as the Worldwide Program Director for the Services Innovation Lab. She recently completed an international assignment at IBM Research-India, working on strategy, business, and user interface design issues for Spoken Web. Sara holds an M.B.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Speech Science from The Graduate Center of CUNY.   ......

Sachin Gupta is part of the Business Development team at IBM Research- India. Over his 11 year career, he has worked primarily in the IT industry, demonstrating strengths in driving multinational teams with diverse capabilities. He has extensive global work experience across many different countries. Sachin has a B.Tech in Computer Engineering and an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad.

Samrat Baul, Director Application Design and Speech Analytics, [24]7

Samrat Baul leads the Application Design and Analytics team at [24]7. He is a Design expert with more than ten years of experience designing structured and unstructured applications for American Express, USAA, Continental Airlines and other Fortune 500 companies. Samrat is a veteran in the speech industry, having spent years at Verizon and Tellme. Samrat has a Master's Degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, India.

Brent Bersin, Director, IPFC Corp.

Brent Bersin, a Director of IPFC Corp., has significant experience providing financial, economic, valuation, damages quantification consulting, and expert witness services in intellectual property disputes.  He has a B.B.A. in Accounting from the University of Houston, and is a Certified Public Account (CPA) and Certified Licensing Professional (CLP).

Jonathan Bloom, Senior VUI Designer, SpeechCycle

Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D. is the Senior UX Designer for SpeechCycle.  Jon has designed IVR’s for Amtrak, Verizon, Guardian, Baltimore Gas and Electric, Charter, Nestle, Microsoft and many others.  He has also designed in-car speech interfaces for Ford and Jaguar as well as multimodal interfaces for smart phones.  Before SpeechCycle, Jon was a lead UI designer at Nuance and Dragon.”

Monique Bozeman, Marketing Consultant, Monique Bozeman Consulting

Bozeman is a strategic and tactical marketing consultant with over 20 years experience in voice, speech, CTI, CRM, call center, document and email management technologies and applications. She’s held senior-level marketing roles at VoiceObjects (Voxeo), Genesys, Kana Software and FileNet/IBM and served as editorial director for Voice Processing Magazine and market studies for the speech, voice and call center markets. She has an MFA from Southern Methodist University in Broadcast Journalism.

Ahmed Bouzid, Senior Director, Product and Strategy, Angel

Dr. Ahmed Bouzid is the Sr. Director of Product and Strategy at Angel.  Ahmed has over 15 years of experience in the fields of Speech Automation and Natural Language Processing and has written extensively on Voice Automation and Voice User Interface design. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from The George Washington University, a Master's degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, and a PhD in the Philosophy of Science, also from Virginia Tech. Ahmed is a co-inventor on several patents, awarded and pending, relating to Natural Language Processing, Speech Automation, and Mobility. And he is the co-author of "The Elements of VUI Style," an upcoming book on Voice User Interface design, slated for publication in April 2012. Ahmed can be followed on twitter @Didou.

Laura Bramschreiber, Vice President of Creative Business Solutions, West Interactive

Laura is Vice President of Creative Business Solutions with West Interactive. Laura has an extensive background in sales, marketing, and product management in the customer service and contact center space and is passionate about the customer experience, particularly in emerging engagement channels like social media, mobility and unifying contact technologies.

Daniel C. Burnett, Director of Standards, Voxeo

Dr. Burnett has many years of experience in the Speech Recognition field, is Chief Editor of VoiceXML, SSML, and MRCPv2, Chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group and Co-Chair of the recently completed HTML Speech Incubator Group, has co-authored numerous other industry specifications, and has twice received the prestigious "Speech Luminary" award from Speech Tech Magazine. He has worked at SBC, Vocalocity, and Nuance and continues to remain heavily involved in the development of speech recognition and speech synthesis standards such as the HTML Speech work. Dan is currently the Director of Standards at Voxeo.

Rob Chambers, Principal Group Program Manager, Speech @ Microsoft, Microsoft

Rob Chambers a Group Program Manager in the Speech @ Microsoft team in the Microsoft Business Division. He and his team design and develop the speech recognition and synthesis components and platform included in an increasing number of Microsoft products, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office Communication Server, Windows Mobile, and Windows Vista. After starting at Microsoft in 1995 in the Developer Tools Division, Rob worked on a multitude of products, including Visual Studio, SQL Server, Windows Mobile / CE, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Windows. He was the lead architect and multi-function manager of the team that built and integrated speech recognition into the Windows operating system. Rob has worked on speech or speech related technologies and experiences for over 10 years at Microsoft.

Kevin Chatow, Director, Product Management - Enterprise , Nuance Communications, Inc.

Kevin Chatow is Director, Product Management, at Nuance where he is responsible for Nuance’s core speech portfolio including speech recognition, text-to-speech, security solutions and VoiceXML platform products. He brings more than 14 years of experience in the communication and contact center industry including 11 years in the speech technology field. Kevin holds an MBA from the University of Southern California and an Economics degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gary Clayton, Chief Creative Officer, Nuance Communications

Gary holds a unique role at Nuance that spans the mobile, healthcare, consumer and enterprise markets, driving an innovative team of engineers and creative designers that interpret technology trends through a design lens and attempt to create next-generation user experiences. Prior to joining Nuance, Gary was the vice president of speech strategy for Yahoo!, leading the Company's efforts in creating next-generation speech applications including speech-enabled, unconstricted web search.  Before Yahoo!, Gary was the Chief Creative Officer for Tellme Networks, a division of Microsoft.  Gary holds five US patents and applications, and is a Grammy Award nominee.

Ron Croen, Consultant, Founder and Former CEO, Nuance Communications

Ronald A. Croen, is an entrepreneur, business advisor, private investor and teacher. He was a founder and the CEO for ten years of Nuance Communications, the global leader in voice recognition technology and most recently served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Tufts University, where he taught Entrepreneurial Leadership. Mr. Croen earned a B.A. from Tufts University, and a J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania

Deborah Dahl, Principal, Conversational Technologies

Dr. Deborah Dahl is the Principal at Conversational Technologies, which provides services that enable its clients to apply speech and multimodal technologies to innovative solutions. Dr. Dahl is also active in speech and multimodal standards, serving as the Chair of the W3C’s Multimodal Interaction Working Group.

Patrick Ehlen, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AT&T

Patrick Ehlen is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T. He studied Cognitive Psychology at the New School for Social Research, specializing in psycholinguistics, while working at Dragon Systems and AT&T Labs on developing natural speech and multimodal interfaces. He continued in this vein at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information, and then returned to AT&T in San Francisco in 2008. His interests span cognitive science, natural language processing, multimodal human-computer interaction, and engineering software that integrates comfortably with human society.

Farzad Ehsani, President and CEO, Fluential

Farzad has an 19-year record of management, software development, and research at companies such as Motorola, NEC, Dejima, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Prior to Fluential, he was the business and engineering head of Entropic's Application Group, which was sold to Microsoft in 1999. As Fluential's CEO, Farzad is responsible for defining and articulating the product vision, driving the market opportunity, and managing the day-to-day operations of the company.

E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, Co-Founder & CEO, HarQen Inc

A well-known and serial tech entrepreneur, Kelly Fitzsimmons is the co-founder and CEO of HarQen, a next generation communications company that transforms talk into actionable insights. Under her leadership, HarQen was awarded the PwC Silvertip Award from the Angel Capital Association for startup most likely to reach $500MM within 5 years.

Ariel Freidenberg, Director, Voice Biometric Solutions, Nuance Communications, Inc.

Ariel joined Nuance in November 2010, following the acquisition of PerSay, and has held since then, a key business development role in the voice biometrics team at Nuance. Prior to joining Nuance, Ariel was the EVP for Global Sales & Business Development at PerSay. Ariel holds a B.A. in Law and Economics and an MBA in Business Administration. Prior to joining PerSay, Ariel was an attorney in one of the leading law offices in Israel, following an internship at the Supreme Court of Israel.

Robert Gary, Vice President & General Manager, Mobile Care, Nuance Communications, Inc.

Robert Gary is the Vice President & General Manager responsible for the Nuance Mobile Enterprise business focused on mobile software to enable multi-channel customer care experiences. Over his career, Mr. Gary has developed a broad experience in mobile software and mobile telecommunications.  Prior to joining Nuance, Mr. Gary served as Vice President at Clearwire and Executive Director at AT&T responsible for product and technology development and deployment. 

Brian Gustafson, Principal, Fish & Richardson P.C.

Brian J. Gustafson is a Principal in the Silicon Valley office of Fish & Richardson. His practice emphasizes patent counseling and prosecution in the areas of computer science, electronics, optics, and medical devices. Brian has degrees in physics and math from Linfield College and is a graduate of Stanford Law School.

Mazin Gilbert, Executive Director, Technical Research, ATT Labs

Mazin Gilbert is a leading expert in the area of spoken language technology. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, and an MBA from the Wharton Business School. He is an Executive Director at AT&T Labs managing research in speech recognition and language technologies. Gilbert has over 100 publications, and 59 US patents.

Marti Hearst, Professor, UC Berkeley & Chief IT Strategist, US Patent & Trademark Office

Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and empirical analysis of social media. She has recently completed the first book on Search User Interfaces. Prof. Hearst received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.

Bob Hockman, Vice President of Product Management, Empirix

As VP of Product Management, Bob Hockman directs product strategy for Empirix’s IP, mobile and fixed line test and monitoring offerings. With over 25 years of experience in the communications industry, Bob had consulted on market and product strategy for various startups and held management positions with leading companies including Acterna (now JDSU), TTC, W&G, and Atlantic Research. 

Melvyn Hunt Co-Founder, Novauris

Melvyn Hunt has a doctorate from Oxford University. He has headed speech recognition research for BNR (Nortel), the National Research Council of Canada, Marconi and Dragon Systems UK (jointly with John Bridle). Together with Yoon Kim and John Bridle, he currently runs Novauris Technologies, of which he is a co-founder.

Gabi Ilan, CEO, Command Speech

Gabriel (Gabi) Ilan is a co-founder and CEO of Command Speech Ltd., an Israeli company formed in 2008. Command Speech develops a new generation of speech recognition software for the mobile world. In 1990 he co-founded ART - Advanced Recognition Technologies Inc., and served as its president for 11 years. ART became a pioneer and leader in software algorithms for voice recognition for the cellular market and was acquired by ScanSoft Inc (now Nuance Inc) in 2004.

Michael Johnston, Researcher, AT&T Labs Research

Dr. Michael Johnston has over 21 years of experience in speech and language technology and has worked at the forefront of multimodal interface research for 15 years. He is currently responsible for AT&T's research program in advanced multimodal interfaces, holds 13 U.S. patents, has published over 50 technical papers, and currently serves as editor and chair of the W3C EMMA Multimodal standard.

Tia Jones, Mobile and Enterprise Sales, Nuance Communications

Atieh (Tia) Jones has been in the telecommunications and customer service industries for nearly 20 years.  She holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and has held numerous positions in her career, from designing and developing apps to sales and sales engineering.  She’s worked for Nuance for several years with a current focus on mobility and speech solutions.  

Antoine Kauffeisen, VP Marketing, Acapela Group

Antoine Kauffeisen, Acapela's VP, Director of Marketing since the creation of the Group in 2004, had previously held different managing positions in the speech industry, since 1995. Acting as an International Business Development manager, before becoming Sales Director at Elan Speech, he has a background in linguistics, management and sales."

Nagesh Kharidi, Technical Director, Openstream Inc

Nagesh Kharidi, Technical Director at Openstream Inc, has over 15 years experience working on various mobile infrastructure, platform and application technologies. He is a core member of the team involved in the design and development of Openstream's Cue-me context-aware multimodal platform and is a member of the W3C Multimodal Interaction working group and holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Yoon Kim CEO and Co-Founder , Novauris

Yoon Kim has broad industry and research experience in speech and multimodal interface technologies. Prior to Novauris, Yoon was with SRI International, Stanford CCRMA and NeoSpeech Inc., which he co-founded.  He has also served in the ETSI Aurora DSR Standards Workgroup. Yoon holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University

Scott Kolman, Senior Vice President of Marketing, SpeechCycle

Scott Kolman, Senior Vice President of Marketing at SpeechCycle, has over 20 years of experience in the communications industry. Scott’s high-tech experience spans customer care, product marketing, strategic alliances, industry and channel marketing, market management and marketing communications. Scott has held positions at Amdocs, Nortel Networks, Clarify, Inc., Lucent Technologies and Octel Communications.

James A. Larson, Vice President, Larson Technical Services

For eleven years Jim chaired the World Wide Web’s Voice Browser Working Group, which standardized languages for developing IVR systems including VoiceXML.  Jim is program chair for SpeechTEK and SpeechTEK Europe, and columnist for SpeechTEK Magazine.  He teaches courses in database management systems, XML, user interfaces, and voice applications for Portland State University, Oregon Institute of Technology, and the Oregon Graduate School (now part of Oregon Health and Sciences University. 

Peter Leppik, CEO, Vocalabs

As president and CEO of Vocalabs, Peter Leppik has led efforts to measure, compare and publish customer service quality across a range of industries through third party, independent research, and works with industry associations to sponsor research to advance the state of the art in customer service. Vocalabs’ team has expertise in survey methodology, data communications and data visualization to provide best-in-class tools for improving customer service.

August Lopez, Vice President Information Design, Agero

August Lopez is responsible for Agero's Mobility Solutions, focused specifically on mobile product development and multimodal user experience design. This group directly supports Agero's partners in establishing mobile strategy and delivering best in class consumer experiences across the visual, voice and vehicle domains. Mr. Lopez was previously a Creative Director at Monster Worldwide and holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from Dartmouth College.

Laura Marino, Sr. Director, Product Management - Enterprise, Nuance Communications, Inc.

As Senior Director of Product Management, Laura is responsible for strategy and delivery of Nuance Enterprise products, including analytics, reporting, tools and applications.  Previously she was Director of Product Management at Tellme/Microsoft, in charge of directory assistance and voice search. Prior to Tellme she led Product Marketing and Management at Nuance and held senior positions at SAP and Hydrocomp.  She holds two MS degrees from Stanford University.

Valentine Matula, Director Multimedia Research, Avaya Inc.

Dr. Matula leads research in video, mobile applications, language processing, acoustics and social media networking at Avaya.  He has 20+ years of experience in automated systems at Avaya and its predecessor, Bell Labs.  His Masters is from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. is from Case Western Reserve University.

Bill Meisel, President, TMA Associates and Editor, Speech Strategy News

Bill Meisel is president of TMA Associates and writes Speech Strategy News newsletter. He is co-organizer of the Mobile Voice Conference, and edited a 2010 book, Speech in the User Interface. In the 1980s, he founded and ran a speech recognition company. Meisel holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

Marie Meteer, Principal, MM Consulting

Dr. Marie Meteer has 25 years experience in speech and NLP. She is a Professor at Brandeis University and provides decision support and technology evaluation consulting in the call center, mobile and medical industries. She was VP of Speech at EveryZing and spent 20 years at BBN in research and product management.

Mike Monegan, VP Applications, [24]7

Mike Monegan manages the application design and development functions at [24]7 and has overseen more than 8 years of increasingly sophisticated applications for a wide variety of industries. Mike’s focus is on making [24]7 the customer service industry leader in intelligent speech, mobile and web applications. A 21-year veteran of technology and leadership roles, Mike previously managed the R&D team at IQ Commerce, ran his own consulting company, and held technical leadership positions at NeXT, Apple, Symantec and HP. Mike holds both a BS and MS in Computer Science from MIT.

Todd Mozer, CEO, Sensory

Todd F. Mozer is President, CEO, and Chairman of Sensory, a leading supplier of chips and software for embedded speech applications. Mr. Mozer has worked forever in the speech industry, and holds a bunch of patents on speech technology and applications. His education is from UCSB and Stanford and he enjoys playing guitar and running marathons.

Larry Murphy, Senior Consulting Manager, Convergys

4 years managing the Convergys VUI Design & Usability group.  Before then, 14 years VUI Design experience in field service, shipping logistics, consumer Internet troubleshooting, stock and mutual fund brokerage, insurance, healthcare, banking and utilities applications.  9 years GUI and touch screen Design experience with head-up displays, mailing machines, multi-function hand held devices, and diverse control panels with small displays and keys.

Adithya Padala, President & CEO, UmeVoice

Adithya Padala is the founding CEO of UmeVoice Inc; initially a leader of voice recognition systems for trading with clients such as Goldman Sachs and others. Adithya Padala later transformed the business based on a serendipitous discovery by one of the engineers to the provider of the worlds best noise canceling microphones and headsets under the consumer brand theBoom.

Alan Pan, Vice President Product Management, SpeechCycle

Alan Pan, Vice President of Product Management at SpeechCycle, is responsible for the SmartCare Mobile product line which enables enterprises and service providers to deliver key customer services to the smart device.  Alan has over 20 years of experience in developing products and technology with the past 10 year in the speech technology industry.

Lupo Pape, CEO and Co-founder, SemanticEdge

Dr. Lupo Pape is Managing Director, CEO and co-founder of SemanticEdge GmbH a Berlin-based technology company. SemanticEdge is an innovative leader in the development of spoken dialog systems, mobile apps and interaction management technology. Prior to the foundation of SemanticEdge, Lupo Pape worked as a Project Manager at McKinsey&Company.”

Pranav Patel, VP Systems Development, West Interactive

Pranav Patel leads the product engineering efforts of speech application development tool sets and mobile applications within West Interactive. Pranav has been working with technologies as they emerge for last 20 years, starting with PC based phone systems to complex self-service NL solutions. Pranav holds a Master's degree in Computer Science.

Prasanna Perera, Mobility Product Manager, Angel

Prasanna Perera is the Mobility Product Manager for Angel. With several successful mobile applications, both in the Apple App Store and Android Market under his belt, you will see Prasanna playing an active role in the mobile industry. Prasanna has both an MBA and a MSc from Johns Hopkins University

Michael Phillips, Co-Founder and CTO, Vlingo

Mike Phillips is Co-Founder and CTO of Vlingo. Mike has been active in the speech technology for over twenty years. He started his career as a researcher first at Carnegie Mellon University and then at MIT working on core technology for automatic speech recognition. In 1994, he founded SpeechWorks (now named Nuance).

Roberto Pieraccini, Director, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, CA

Roberto Pieraccini is currently the Director of ICSI, the International Computer Science Institute, an independent advanced computer-science research organization located in Berkeley, CA. Prior to that he was the CTO of SpeechCycle, and worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research, SpeechWorks, Bell Labs, AT&T Shannon Laboratories, and CSELT. His research, with more than 130 publications, ranges from speech recognition to spoken language understanding and dialog, multimodal interaction, and machine learning. He is a fellow of IEEE and ISCA, a member of the AVIOS board, and a member of the editorial board of several scientific and technology magazines. His book “The Voice in the Machine” on the history of computer speech understanding technology, published by MIT Press, will be available on March 21012.

Alex Quilici, CEO, YouMail

Alex Quilici is CEO of YouMail, Inc., a leading provider of direct-to-consumer value-added communications services.  Prior to that, he was CEO and co-founder of Quack.com, a voice-portal company sold to AOL in August 2000, where he then become one of the leaders of the AOL Voice Services division.  He has a PhD from UCLA in computer science and holds several voice-services related patents.

Brian Radloff, Director World Wide Embedded Solutions Architect of the Mobile Speech Division, Nuance Communications

Brian K. Radloff is Director World Wide Embedded Solutions Architect of the Mobile Speech Division at Nuance. His Team is responsible for the developing customer specific voice solutions for embedded markets including Mobile Handsets, Automotive, Personal Navigation, Gaming, etc. Radloff holds an MBA from The Krannert School of Management, Purdue University and BSEE, Purdue University.

José M. Recio, Co-Founder, Solaiemes

Co-Founder at Solaiemes, helping carriers to keep their role relevant, allowing them to build mass market alternatives to over-the-top, by opening their enablers to 3rd parties without surrendering their strenghts. Look beyond the smartphone + apps model, universal services require a different approach.

Dave Rich, CEO, Lumenvox

Dave launched his first speech application in 1997 while a Call Center Director at American Airlines. He joined Nuance as Director of Sales Operations and Industry Marketing, Jott Networks as VP Operations, and was COO for multiple start-ups. Dave holds an MBA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany.

Brigitte Richardson, Global Lead, Voice Control Technology/Speech Systems, Ford

Brigitte Richardson is Senior Engineer and global lead at Ford Motor Company for Voice Control. She has worked in various capacities in the Automotive Industry since 1994. Currently she concentrates on VUI design for Ford’s voice-activated SYNC products. She holds a BSEE from Kettering and an MSE from Purdue University.

Jeff Rogers, VP Sales, Sensory

Jeff Rogers is the Vice President of Sales and a co-founder of Sensory.  He has been focused on selling and designing voice user interfaces for more than seventeen years in hundreds of products using Sensory speech technologies.  He has experience working in the mobile, appliance, automotive, home automation, toy and game, and general consumer electronics industries. 

Terry Saeger, Senior VP and General Manager, VoltDelta

Terry Saeger is SVP and General Manager for VoltDelta’s OnDemand, Service Provider Solutions and LSSIDATA business units. Terry has over 20 years of senior leadership experience in Telecommunication and Business Process Outsourcing markets with organizations that include Convergys, West Teleservices, AT&T, and iBasis. In his current role, Terry is responsible for all sales, marketing, product management, pre-sales engineering, business development and channel management for three VoltDelta business units.

Priit Salumaa, Development Partner, BIOMETRY

Priit Salumaa is a well known Estonian mobile enthusiast and a software engineer with 11 years of experience in the industry working at different startups and currently his own co-founded Mooncascade LLC. He is also an NGO and startup activist being the co-founder of Garage48 Foundation and MobileMonday Estonia. On the Mobile Voice Conference he is representing as a strategic development partner the BIOMETRY.com AG and their newest solutions

Hassan Sawaf, HLT Director and Chief Scientist, SAIC

Hassan Sawaf is an internationally recognized scientist and engineer with more than 15 years of experience in research, development, management and strategic planning of human language technology (HLT). His special interests cover general natural language processing, machine translation, speech recognition, signal processing and machine learning, especially if applied on noisy, scarce and/or unstructured data. He finished his doctoral studies in 2003 at the University of Aachen, Germany.

Tom Schalk, VP, Voice Technology, Agero

Dr. Thomas B. Schalk is Vice President, Voice Technology at Agero, a leading connected vehicle service provider with customers that include Hyundai, Toyota, Lexus, and BMW.  He leads a group that focuses on automotive speech solutions and user interfaces that are safe to use while driving. Prior to Agero, Dr. Schalk was the CTO of Philips Speech Processing, and the CTO of Voice Control Systems. He has over twenty years of experience in the speech recognition industry. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his BSEE from the George Washington University.

Thomas Scheerbarth, Senior Expert R&D, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories

Thomas joined 2008 Deutsche Telekom Laboratories which transformed to Telekom Innovation Laboratories in 2011. His current activities are focussed on conception, development and realisation of intuitive, multimodal user interfaces for different kinds of services and mobile terminals. Thomas has also long experience in international standardisation, currently he is active in the area of messaging services like Enhanced Visual Voicemail (EVVM) and Rich Communication

Bill Scholz, President, NewSpeech, LLC, and President, Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS)

Dr. Scholz has over 35 years experience in cognitive science, computer based training, expert systems, and speech / natural language processing.  He is a frequent industry speaker, author of numerous publications, and president of AVIOS, the speech industry’s oldest professional organization .  He has consulted extensively for domestic and international organizations in architectural design, speech technology, knowledge-based systems and integration strategies.  Dr. Scholz’ primary focus is on speech application development methodology, service creation environments, and technology assessment.

Vlad Sejnoh, Chief Technology Officer, Nuance Communications

As Nuance’s Chief Technology Officer, Vlad Sejnoha oversees the company’s research and focuses on core technology and product strategy, with a particular emphasis on natural language processing and mobile applications. Prior to joining Nuance, Vlad was the Chief Scientist at L&H, and earlier at Kurzweil AI, where he was responsible for creating technology for a number of commercially successful speech recognition products, including large vocabulary continuous speech dictation systems. Vlad studied Electrical Engineering at McGill University, has 30 years experience in the field of speech recognition, and holds thirteen US patents and nine pending applications.

Manish Sharma, Sr. VP, Business Solutions, West Interactive

In his current role of Sr. VP of Business Solutions at West Interactive, Manish is responsible for application delivery, user interface design and product engineering. In that capacity, he also leads the key initiative to build West Interactive’s next-generation customer contact solutions targeting emerging channels, such as mobile, social media and outbound messaging.  Prior to joining West, Manish held multiple positions of progressive responsibility at Tuvox, Nortel and SpeakEZ.

Phil Sheehy, Director - Business Development, Openstream

Phil Sheehy, Director of Sales at Opensteam, has over 25 years of experience in Enterprise Computing as well as 15 year in the Mobile/Wireless computing area. Phil has worked with many Fortune 100 Enterprises to plan and execute wireless strategies in industries such as Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Government and Retail.

Dena Skrbina, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Enterprise Division, Nuance Communications, Inc.

Dena Skrbina is a Senior Director at Nuance who has built her career helping contact centers deploy superior self-service that decreases costs while improving customer experiences. For the past 10 years she’s worked with F500 companies to achieve even greater benefit by delivering these services in the cloud.

Valene Skerpac, President, iBiometrics, Inc.

Valene Skerpac leads iBiometrics’ research and product development activities and consulting services.  Valene helps organizations drive innovation and manage risks associated with new generation multi-modal and mobile applications.  She is a senior security professional, expert in voice biometrics, who brings experience gained in a variety of high technology businesses to her position. 

Joachim Stegmann, Research & Innovation Director Future Communication, Deutsche Telekom AG

Joachim Stegmann has worked in the area of speech technology and related applications for almost 20 years. He is now Research & Innovation Director ‘Future Communication’ at Telekom Innovation Laboratories where he is responsible for innovation development for new voice and communication products of Deutsche Telekom. Joachim holds a Dr.-Ing. degree in information technology from Aachen University of Technology, Germany.

Nandini Stocker, Sr. VUI Designer, Convergys

Nandini Stocker is a Senior VUI Designer at Convergys with 12 years experience in the speech industry. She specializes in large enterprise deployments as well as first-time speech conversions. Also of note, Nandini has made her mark on some of the most widely used IVR applications in New Zealand.

Adeline Tang, Director of Business Development, SingTel

Based in Silicon Valley, Adeline Tang has been with SingTel for the past 15 years holding numerous positions in Product Management, Marketing and Sales. She is currently a Director of Business Development at SingTel Idea Factory, where she is focused on scouting for innovations that are aligned with SingTel’s strategic interest. She is responsible for developing relationships with the start-up eco-system in Silicon Valley so as to build partnerships that allow SingTel to develop and commercialize products and services.

Travis True, Vice President Business Development, Voice Vault

Travis True joins VoiceVault as Vice President of Business Development focusing on increasing adoption of the VoiceVault biometric technology into the global commercial market.   Travis brings with him over 10 years leadership experience in the acquisition, development, and delivery of enterprise technology solutions.  Travis most recently before joining VoiceVault focused in delivering healthcare technology serving some of the worlds most prestigious hospitals such as.  Travis graduated with honors from University of Arizona and Masters of Healthcare Business Administration from University California Irvine.

Raj Tumulari, President & CEO, OpenStream

Raj leads the context-aware multimodal platform and Enterprise mobile applications development at Openstream. With over 17 years of experience in distributed computing, multimodal technology, international standards development, is a co-author of several Speech & Multimodal Interaction standards at the W3C. His current research focuses on human-centric-interfaces in context-aware distributed mobile applications using multimodality & OSGi technology.

Sunil Vemuri, Chief Product Officer, reQall, Inc.

Sunil co-founded and oversees product development at reQall. Previously, he worked at France Telecom and Apple. Sunil’s interests include Human and Organizational Memory, AI, Information Retrieval, Speech Recognition, and Interface/Interaction design. He has 5 patents and his research has been covered by the New York Times, Boston Globe, Newsweek, CNN, and MIT Technology Review. Sunil received his Ph.D. from MIT’s Media Lab, Masters from Stanford University, and Bachelors from UCLA.

Peter Voss, CEO, Smart Action Company

Peter is an entrepreneur with a background in electronics, business and technical software, as well as management. More recently he has been working in the fields of philosophy, psychology, ethics and computer science. In 2001 he founded a company with the express goal of developing a commercially viable general-purpose AI engine.

Lin Weaver,  Producer , Capital Public Radio inc., (NPR)

Lin Weaver is an Assistant Producer with Capital Public Radio (NPR) in Sacramento. She is a former speech applications software developer with years in the software industry. Lin is trilingual in Italian, French and English. She holds a BA from the University of Geneva and an MA from Tufts University.

Paul Welham, CEO, CereProc

Paul Welham was one the founders of CereProc in 2005. He has over 30 years’ experience in the IT, with the last 11 years dedicated to speech. CereProc has developed an advanced new generation of speech synthesis designed for mobile devices, CereVoice. CereVoice is a scale able speech engine that produces characterful and emotional speech.

Silke Witt-Ehsani, Vice President, Speech Solutions, Fluential

Dr. Silke Witt is VP of Speech Solutions at FLuential, focussing on interactive speech solutions for mobile devices. Previously, she managed the TuVox Design Center covering spoken dialog systems for call centers. She has over 12 years of experience with leading-edge speech solutions and holds a PhD in Speech Recognition from Cambridge University, England.