Alan W Black is a Scottish

Scottish people

The Scottish people , or Scots, are a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically they emerged from an amalgamation of the Picts and Gaels, incorporating neighbouring Britons to the south as well as invading Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse.In modern use,...

 computer scientist

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, known for his research on speech synthesis

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

. He is an associate professor in the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

.

Black did his undergraduate studies at Coventry University

Coventry University

Coventry University is a post-1992 university in Coventry, West Midlands, England. Under the terms of the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, the institution's name was changed from Coventry Polytechnic to Coventry University...

, graduating in 1984. He earned a masters degree from the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1993. After working at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kansai Science City

Kansai Science City

is an unincorporated city located in the , a border region between Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara Prefectures of Japan. The name is commonly shortened to or...

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 and at the University of Edinburgh, he took a research faculty position at Carnegie Mellon in 1999. In 2008 he became a regular faculty member with tenure at CMU.

Black wrote the Festival Speech Synthesis System

Festival Speech Synthesis System

Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system originally developed by Alan W. Black at at the University of Edinburgh. Substantial contributions have also been provided by Carnegie Mellon University and other sites...

 at Edinburgh, and continues to develop it at Carnegie Mellon. He has also worked on machine translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

 of speech at CMU, and is the co-founder and chief scientist at Cepstral

Cepstral LLC

Cepstral is a provider of speech synthesis technology and services. It was founded by leading scientists from Carnegie Mellon University including computer scientists Kevin Lenzo and Alan W. Black, in June 2000. It is a privately held corporation with headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...

, a Pittsburgh-based speech translation technology company.

External links

• Faculty web page at CMU