Shinji Watanabe
Also known as S Watanabe, S. WATANABE, S. Watanabe, Watanabe Shinji
Shinji Watanabe is a speech researcher whose work includes automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, spoken language understanding, and machine learning for speech and language processing. He earned degrees at Waseda and worked at NTT, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, and Johns Hopkins. In 2017, he co-authored a hybrid CTC/attention speech recognition model; in 2018, he helped introduce ESPnet, an open-source end-to-end speech processing toolkit. He became an ISCA Fellow in 2023 for his contributions to speech recognition research and leadership. Since April 2025, he has held visiting posts at Tohoku University and NHK while serving as an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon.
Timeline
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1999–2006
Degrees at Waseda
He earns a bachelor's degree in 1999, a master's degree in 2001, and a PhD in 2006, all at Waseda University.
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2001–2011
A research post at NTT
He joins NTT Communication Science Laboratories as a researcher in April 2001 and works there through June 2011.
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2012–2017
Senior scientist at MERL
He joins Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in January 2012 and becomes a senior principal research scientist in October 2014; he leaves in June 2017.
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2017–2020
Associate professor at Johns Hopkins
He joins Johns Hopkins University as an associate research professor in July 2017 and holds that post through December 2020.
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2017
A hybrid speech model
He co-authors “Hybrid CTC/attention architecture for end-to-end speech recognition,” published in 2017.
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2018
The ESPnet toolkit
He and his collaborators introduce ESPnet, an open-source platform for end-to-end speech processing, in 2018. Its paper focuses on automatic speech recognition and describes experiments with Chainer and PyTorch.
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2023
An ISCA Fellowship
He becomes an ISCA Fellow in 2023 for his contributions to research and leadership in speech recognition technologies.
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Since April 2025
Associate professor at CMU
He is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, a role he has held since January 2021. In April 2025, he also becomes a visiting professor at Tohoku University's Center for Language AI Research and a visiting researcher at NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories. His research interests include automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, spoken language understanding, and machine learning for speech and language processing.
Sources and credits
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