PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

James Glass

Also known as Jim Glass

James Glass is a senior research scientist at MIT who leads the Spoken Language Systems Group and works on AI for speech recognition and spoken language. He holds S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and coauthored a 1989 report on the VOYAGER speech understanding system. He and Regina Barzilay led a searchable MIT lecture tool in 2007, and IEEE named him a Fellow in 2014 for work on speech recognition and spoken dialogue. He coauthored PARP, which makes speech recognition more efficient for uncommon languages, in November 2021 and CAV-MAE Sync in May 2025. In April 2026, he advised an MIT CSAIL thesis on multimodal multilingual audio.

Works
572
Citations
21,933
h-index
70

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1989

    The VOYAGER speech system

    He holds S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. In 1989, he coauthors “The VOYAGER Speech Understanding System: A Progress Report.”

  2. 2007

    Searching MIT lectures

    In 2007, he and Regina Barzilay lead a web tool that lets users search hundreds of MIT lectures for key topics.

  3. 2014

    An IEEE fellowship

    IEEE names him a Fellow in 2014 for contributions to probabilistic segment-based speech recognition and spoken dialogue interfaces.

  4. November 2021

    Pruning speech models

    In November 2021, he coauthors PARP, a method that makes speech recognition more efficient for uncommon languages.

  5. May 2025

    Matching audio with video

    In May 2025, he coauthors CAV-MAE Sync, a model that learns fine-grained matches between video frames and their corresponding audio.

  6. As of October 2026

    Senior research scientist at MIT

    As of October 2026, he is a senior research scientist at MIT and leads the Spoken Language Systems Group. In April 2026, he advises Andrew Rouditchenko’s MIT CSAIL thesis on multimodal multilingual audio.

Sources and credits

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  1. The VOYAGER Speech Understanding System: A Progress Report aclanthology.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Jim Glass | MIT CSAIL csail.mit.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. MIT develops lecture search engine to aid students news.mit.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter, Fall 2014 signalprocessingsociety.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Toward speech recognition for uncommon spoken languages csail.mit.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. AI learns how vision and sound are connected, without human intervention csail.mit.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. THESIS DEFENSE: Multimodal Multilingual Audio Understanding | MIT CSAIL csail.mit.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.