PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Richard Stern

Also known as Richard M. Stern, Rich Stern

Richard Stern is a Carnegie Mellon University engineer whose research concerns robust speech recognition and binaural hearing. After electrical engineering degrees from MIT and Berkeley, he joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1977 and shared the university's Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence in 1992. With Chanwoo Kim, he introduced Power-Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC), an auditory-based feature extraction method for speech in noise, at Interspeech in 2009 and in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing in 2016. He chaired Interspeech 2006, served as ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2008–2009, became an ISCA Fellow in 2011, and received the Lutron Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018. He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and an Artist Lecturer in its School of Music.

Works
340
Citations
6,126
h-index
38
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1970–1977

    Degrees from MIT and Berkeley

    He earns an S.B. from MIT in 1970, an M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972, and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977, all in electrical engineering. In 1977, he joins the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University.

  2. 1992

    The Allen Newell Award

    In 1992, he is a co-recipient of Carnegie Mellon's Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence for his work in robust speech recognition.

  3. 2002–2006

    Chairing Interspeech 2006

    In 2002, he is Technical Program Chair of the 141st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Pittsburgh. In 2006, he serves as General Chair of Interspeech.

  4. 2008–2009

    ISCA Distinguished Lecturer

    The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) names him its Distinguished Lecturer for 2008–2009.

  5. 2009–2016

    Power-Normalized Cepstral Coefficients

    In 2009, he and Chanwoo Kim present Power-Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC) at Interspeech, a feature extraction method for robust speech recognition that is based on auditory processing. The full paper appears in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing in 2016 and reports gains over MFCC and PLP processing for speech in additive noise and reverberant environments.

  6. 2011

    An ISCA Fellowship

    ISCA names him a Fellow in 2011 for his contributions to robust speech recognition and auditory perception.

  7. 2018

    Lutron teaching award

    He receives the Lutron Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Carnegie Mellon

    He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, with courtesy appointments in the Language Technologies Institute and the Department of Computer Science, and an Artist Lecturer in the School of Music. His research concerns robust speech recognition and binaural hearing.

Career

  1. Since 1977Carnegie Mellon UniversityProfessor of electrical and computer engineering

Education

  1. 1977Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPh.D.
  2. 1972University of California, BerkeleyM.S.
  3. 1970Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyS.B.

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. A vector Taylor series approach for environment-independent speech recognition2002 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 422 citations
  2. Power-Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC) for robust speech recognition2012 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 368 citations
  3. Missing-feature approaches in speech recognition2005 · IEEE Signal Processing Magazine · 227 citations
  4. Reconstruction of missing features for robust speech recognition2004 · Speech Communication · 210 citationsWith Bhiksha Raj
  5. Lateralization of complex binaural stimuli: A weighted-image model1988 · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 174 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Richard Stern - College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University engineering.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Richard M. Stern named ISCA Distinguished Lecturer (Acoustics Today, Fall 2008) acousticstoday.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Feature extraction for robust speech recognition using a power-law nonlinearity and power-bias subtraction isca-archive.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Power-Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC) for Robust Speech Recognition research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. ISCA - ISCA Fellow Program isca-speech.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Dr. Richard Stern - School of Music - Carnegie Mellon University cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Richard Stern - Electrical and Computer Engineering - College of Engineering - Carnegie Mellon University ece.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Richard Stern's Personal Home Page cs.cmu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.