PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Thomas Hain

Thomas Hain is a professor of speech and audio technology whose career links speech technology in industry with research at Cambridge and Sheffield. By 1994, he had earned a Dipl.-Ing in Electrical/Communication Engineering from the University of Technology, Vienna; he worked at Philips Speech Processing and completed a Cambridge PhD on automatic speech recognition in 2002. At Sheffield, he joined the Speech and Hearing Group in 2004 and led its automatic speech recognition team for the AMI meeting projects. ISCA elected him a Fellow in 2020 for leadership in automatic speech recognition; in 2025, he coauthored work on fast word-error-rate estimation, and in May 2026 he coauthored work on speech enhancement with self-supervised representations. As of October 2026, he is Professor of Speech and Audio Technology and School Director of Research at Sheffield, and directs the university's CDT in Speech and Language Technologies and Liveperson Centre.

Works
308
Citations
4,943
h-index
34
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. By 1994

    An engineering degree in Vienna

    By 1994, he holds a Dipl.-Ing in Electrical/Communication Engineering from the University of Technology, Vienna.

  2. 1997–2002

    Cambridge speech recognition

    After working in the Speech Technology Group at Philips Speech Processing, he joins Cambridge's Speech, Vision and Robotics Group as a research associate and PhD student in 1997. He completes a PhD in Information Engineering in 2002 with a thesis on hidden model sequence models for automatic speech recognition.

  3. 2004–2011

    Sheffield's Speech and Hearing Group

    He joins Sheffield's Speech and Hearing Group as a Lecturer in Computer Science in 2004. Sheffield promotes him to Senior Lecturer in 2008 and Reader in 2011.

  4. 2004

    Leading the AMI ASR team

    The EU FP6 AMI project begins in 2004 and is succeeded by AMIDA, with both projects focused on understanding multimodal data from meetings. He heads the University of Sheffield's automatic speech recognition team for the AMI work.

  5. 2020

    An ISCA Fellowship

    ISCA elects him a Fellow in 2020 for leadership in automatic speech recognition.

  6. 2025

    Fast word-error-rate estimation

    In 2025, he coauthors the ICASSP paper "Fast Word Error Rate Estimation Using Self-Supervised Representations for Speech and Text." It introduces Fe-WER, which uses average pooling over self-supervised representations of speech and text to estimate word error rate.

  7. May 2026

    Speech enhancement at ICASSP

    In May 2026, he coauthors a paper on position-invariant fine-tuning of speech enhancement models with self-supervised speech representations at ICASSP 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research leadership at Sheffield

    As of October 2026, he is Professor of Speech and Audio Technology and School Director of Research at Sheffield. He directs the CDT in Speech and Language Technologies and Liveperson Centre.

Career

  1. Since 2004University of SheffieldLecturer in Computer Science, Senior Lecturer
  2. 1997–2002University of CambridgeResearch Associate

Education

  1. 2002University of CambridgePhD
  2. 1994TU WienDipl.-Ing in Electrical/Communication Engineering

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

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Sheffield. 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 University of Sheffield. 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 University of Sheffield. 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. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes University of Sheffield. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Professor Thomas Hain | Computer Science | The University of Sheffield sheffield.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Biographical information | Professor Thomas Hain staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Advanced Speech Recognition Technology | Computer Science | The University of Sheffield sheffield.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Projects | BUT Speech@FIT speech.fit.vut.cz. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Professor Thomas Hain elected as ISCA Fellow | Computer Science | The University of Sheffield sheffield.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. ISCA Services services.isca-speech.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Fast Word Error Rate Estimation Using Self-Supervised Representations for Speech and Text arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.