Hervé Bourlard

Timeline

1. 1982–1994

   Philips, ICSI and L&H

   Born in Belgium, he earns an engineering degree at the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in 1982 and works at the Philips Research Laboratory in Brussels until 1990 on hidden Markov models and neural networks for speech recognition. From September 1988 to May 1989, he is on leave as a guest scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. He then serves as R&D manager at the start-up L&H Speech Products from 1990 to 1994, where he leads its speech recognition department, and completes a PhD in applied sciences at Mons in 1992.

2. 1994–1997

   A book on hybrid speech recognition

   With Nelson Morgan of ICSI, a collaborator since 1988, he integrates the sequence matching of hidden Markov models with the phonetic discrimination of neural networks for automatic speech recognition. The pair publish the book Connectionist Speech Recognition: A Hybrid Approach in 1994, and their May 1995 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine paper on the hybrid HMM/connectionist approach wins the IEEE Signal Processing Society Award in April 1997.

3. 1996–2004

   Director of Idiap

   In November 1996, he becomes director of the IDIAP Research Institute, a nonprofit institute affiliated with EPFL and the University of Geneva that works on speech processing, computer vision and machine learning. He also joins EPFL as a professor in 1997 and becomes a full professor in December 2004. The IEEE names him a Fellow in January 2000 for contributions to statistical speech recognition and neural networks.

4. 2001–2013

   The IM2 research center

   He is founding director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research on Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2), which Idiap runs from 2001 to 2013 and which yields 17 spin-off companies. He also starts and coordinates EU projects such as AMI and AMIDA on augmented multiparty interaction, which together receive about $30 million from the European Commission.

5. 2013–2016

   ISCA Fellow and Swiss academy

   In August 2013, the International Speech Communication Association names him a Fellow for contributions to research and leadership in statistical and neural network-based speech recognition. He becomes a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2016.

6. 2022

   The IEEE Flanagan award

   He and Nelson Morgan receive the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award for contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition. He is the first Swiss researcher to win it, while directing Idiap and heading its Speech & Audio Processing research group.

7. 2023

   Retirement and a BioAlps award

   He retires as director of Idiap at the end of March 2023 after 27 years at the head of the Martigny institute for artificial intelligence research, and Andrea Cavallaro succeeds him. In November 2023, he receives the BioAlps Academia Award.

8. As of October 2026

   Honorary professor at EPFL

   A former Idiap director (1996–2023), he is an honorary professor at EPFL. He serves on the award committee of the Dalle Molle Foundation's annual competition, which gives a Quality of Life label to research projects that put digital technology at the service of humanity.