PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Shoko Araki

Also known as 荒木 章子, 須山 章子

Shoko Araki is a speech-processing researcher at NTT whose work centers on blind source separation of noisy and reverberant speech. After earning degrees at the University of Tokyo in 1998 and 2000, she joined NTT in 2000 and completed a doctorate at Hokkaido University in 2007. Her honours include the Awaya Prize in 2001, the Itakura Prize in 2008, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2014 and her naming as an IEEE Fellow in 2022. She chaired the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee in 2023–2024, gave an Interspeech keynote on conversational speech frontends in 2024, and was first author of an ICASSP 2025 review of three decades of source separation research. Today she leads the Signal Processing Research Group at NTT Communication Science Laboratories.

Now at
NTT
Works
316
Citations
7,935
h-index
44
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1998–2001

    Tokyo degrees and joining NTT

    She earns a B.E. at the University of Tokyo in 1998 and an M.E. in 2000, and joins NTT in 2000, where her research covers acoustic signal processing, microphone array signal processing and blind speech separation. The Acoustical Society of Japan gives her its Awaya Prize Young Researcher Award in 2001.

  2. 2003–2008

    Prizes and a Hokkaido doctorate

    She wins the Best Paper Award at IWAENC in 2003, the TELECOM System Technology Award from the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation in 2004, and the Academic Encouraging Prize of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers in 2006. She completes a doctorate at Hokkaido University in 2007, and the Acoustical Society of Japan gives her its Itakura Prize Innovative Young Researcher Award in 2008.

  3. 2014–2015

    Best paper and Young Scientists' Prize

    In 2014, she receives the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award and the Young Scientists' Prize of the Commendation for Science and Technology from Japan's Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. She earns an Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Award at IEEE ASRU in 2015.

  4. 2019

    All-neural meeting analysis

    In 2019, she is a coauthor, with Thilo von Neumann, Keisuke Kinoshita, Marc Delcroix, Tomohiro Nakatani and Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, of an ICASSP paper that presents the first all-neural approach to simultaneous speaker counting, diarization and source separation for meeting analysis. The block-online neural network tracks speakers even when they stay silent for several time blocks.

  5. 2022

    Named an IEEE Fellow

    IEEE names her a Fellow in 2022 for contributions to blind source separation of noisy and reverberant speech signals. Her work shows how blind source separation based on independent component analysis relates to acoustic adaptive beamforming.

  6. 2023–2024

    Chair of the audio committee

    She chairs the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee from 2023 to 2024, after serving as a member from 2014 to 2019 and as vice-chair in 2022. In 2025, she is its past chair.

  7. 2024–2025

    Interspeech keynote and ICASSP review

    In 2024, she gives the Interspeech keynote "Frontier of Frontend for Conversational Speech Processing", on speech enhancement and speaker diarization for conversations recorded with distant microphones. In 2025, she is first author of the ICASSP paper "30+ Years of Source Separation Research: Achievements and Future Challenges", a review of three decades of source separation written for ICASSP's 50th anniversary with Nobutaka Ito, Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, Gordon Wichern, Zhong-Qiu Wang and Yuki Mitsufuji.

  8. As of October 2026

    Leading signal processing at NTT

    She is a researcher in the Media Information Research Department at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, where she heads the Signal Processing Research Group. In 2026, she coauthors an ICASSP 2026 paper with Tomohiro Nakatani, Rintaro Ikeshita, Naoyuki Kamo and Marc Delcroix on generating training targets for real-world speech enhancement from close and distant microphones.

Career

  1. Since 2001NTTResearcher; Head of the Signal Processing Research Group
  2. 2019–2025NTT Communications Corporation

Education

  1. 2007Hokkaido UniversityDoctorate
  2. 2000University of TokyoM.E.
  3. 1998University of TokyoB.E.

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

Most-cited works

  1. A Robust and Precise Method for Solving the Permutation Problem of Frequency-Domain Blind Source Separation2004 · IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing · 577 citations
  2. Underdetermined Convolutive Blind Source Separation via Frequency Bin-Wise Clustering and Permutation Alignment2010 · IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing · 343 citations
  3. The fundamental limitation of frequency domain blind source separation for convolutive mixtures of speech2003 · IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing · 323 citations
  4. Multichannel Extensions of Non-Negative Matrix Factorization With Complex-Valued Data2013 · IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing · 266 citationsWith Naonori Ueda
  5. Underdetermined blind sparse source separation for arbitrarily arranged multiple sensors2007 · Signal Processing · 233 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Shoko Araki. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes NTT. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes NTT. 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.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Hokkaido 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.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Shoko Araki yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Member Highlight: Dr. Shoko Araki | IEEE Signal Processing Society signalprocessingsociety.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Shoko Araki - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Keynote Speakers - Interspeech 2024 interspeech2024.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. All-neural online source separation, counting, and diarization for meeting analysis arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. NTT's 17 papers accepted for INTERSPEECH2024, the world's largest international conference on spoken language processing | Topics | NTT group.ntt. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. NTT's 22 papers accepted for ICASSP2025, the world's largest international conference on signal processing technology | Topics | NTT group.ntt. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. NTT's 21 papers accepted for ICASSP2026, the world's largest international conference on signal processing technology | Topics | NTT group.ntt. Checked 20 October 2026.