Keikichi Hirose

Also known as Hirose Keikichi

Keikichi Hirose is a speech researcher whose work on prosody informs speech recognition and synthesis. He earned engineering degrees at the University of Tokyo, became a professor there, and led a national project on spoken-language processing through prosody. He chaired ISCA’s Speech Prosody group, became an ISCA Fellow in 2018, and received the Acoustical Society of Japan’s Achievement Award in 2020. As of October 2026, he is a Project Professor at the National Institute of Informatics.

Now at: Research Organization of Information and Systems
Badges: Pioneer

Timeline

1972–1977

Engineering degrees at Tokyo

He earns a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic engineering at the University of Tokyo in 1972 and a Ph.D. in electronic engineering there in 1977.
1977–1994

Lecturer to professor

He joins the University of Tokyo as a lecturer in 1977 and becomes a professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering in 1994.
1987–1988

Visiting scientist at MIT

From March 1987 to January 1988, he works as a visiting scientist at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.
2000–2018

Leading speech prosody research

From 2000 to 2004, he leads a national project on spoken-language processing through prosodic features. From 2010 to 2018, he chairs ISCA’s Speech Prosody Special Interest Group.
2004–2016

Prosody in speech systems

In a 2004 paper with Nobuaki Minematsu, he examines how prosodic features can advance speech recognition. In a 2016 talk, he explains how a fundamental-frequency contour model connects linguistic information with HMM-based speech synthesis.
2018

An ISCA Fellowship

He becomes an ISCA Fellow in 2018.
2020

An Acoustical Society award

He receives the Acoustical Society of Japan’s Achievement Award in 2020 for contributions to spoken-language processing.
As of October 2026

Project Professor at NII

As of October 2026, he is a Project Professor at the National Institute of Informatics’ Center for Robust Intelligence and Social Technology.