Dr. David Nahamoo

Chief Scientist, Conversational Systems, IBM

Dr. David Nahamoo
"Purdue University provided me an amazing environment to learn from wonderful professors and to build a solid technical foundation for my professional success. I am always thankful for the opportunity to become part of the Purdue family, not only for the technical education that I received but also for the life experience, friendship, and support while at Purdue and beyond. I am forever grateful to my advisor Avi Kak and professors McGillem and Huang in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who reinforced in me the interest and desire to pursue the unknown."
 

Dr. David Nahamoo is an IBM Fellow and currently Chief Scientist for Conversational Systems at IBM Research.

Dr. Nahamoo joined IBM Research in 1982 as a member of the speech recognition team. During his early years at IBM Research, he focused on development of statistical machine learning techniques for acoustic modeling, noise robustness, hypothesis search, and language modeling for improving speech recognition systems. Since 1993, he has taken additional responsibilities in a variety of managerial and technical leadership positions. He was Interim General Manager for the IBM Speech Business Unit in 1993. He was responsible for delivering speech technologies to IBM Divisions for desktop, embedded, and server based products from 1993 to 2006. In 2006, he became the IBM Research Speech CTO, responsible for IBM Research technical and business strategy for speech technologies across IBM global labs. Since 2012, he has been an active technical lead at IBM in cognitive computing, shaping the company’s direction in conversational systems and driving the research and development for IBM Watson Conversation products.

Dr. Nahamoo holds more than 60 patents, has published more than 90 technical papers in scientific journals and conferences, and delivered many keynotes and invited talks at technical and trade conferences. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Fellow of the IEEE as well as an ISCA Fellow. In 2001, he received the IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award. Dr. Nahamoo and his team received the IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition Award for “long-term commitment to pioneering research and innovative development in speech recognition” in 2009 and the IBM Research Extraordinary Accomplishment Award for speech technologies in 2010.

Dr. Nahamoo received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1982, a master's degree in electrical engineering from Imperial College of London in 1976, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Tehran University in 1970.