Dr. Carol Espy-Williams
University of Maryland (UMD) - Professor,
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Institute for Systems Research (ISR), Faculty Member
CEO & Founder -
OmniSpeech
Academic Research
Communications and Signal Processing Laboratory (CSPL)
Professor Espy-Wilson's research
interests include the integration of engineering, linguistics and
speech acoustics to study speech communication. She is developing an
approach to speech recognition based on phonetic features,
articulatory parameters and landmarks to better address variability
in the speech signal. She also conducts research in the areas of
speech production, speech enhancement, speaker recognition,
single-channel speaker separation and language and genre detection in
audio content analysis and forensics. A major focus of her research
is to gain a better understanding of the relationship between
articulation, acoustics and perception and to use this knowledge to
develop effective speech technologies. Prof. Espy-Wilson heads the
Speech Communication Lab where postdoctoral, graduate and
undergraduate students perform research. Her research has been
largely supported by grants from the
National Science Foundation and
the
National Institutes of Health. Professor Espy-Wilson teaches the
undergraduate courses Numerical Techniques in Engineering (ENEE 241),
Signals and Systems (ENEE 322), Digital Signal Processing (ENEE 425),
and the advanced graduate level course, Speech and Audio Processing,
ENEE 632.
Background
Carol Espy-Wilson received her B.S. in
Electrical Engineering from
Stanford University in 1979. She received
her SM and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from
MITin 1984 and 1987, respectively. She was on faculty at Boston
University from 1990 to 2001 and is Professor in the Electrical and
Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland,
College Park. She directs the Speech Communication Lab at UMD.
She is the recipient of the NSF
Minority Initiation Award (1990-1992), the Clare Booth Luce
Professorship (1990-1995) the NIH Independent Scientist Award
(1998-2003), the Honda Initiation Award (2004-2005), and a Radcliffe
Fellowship (2008).
Dr. Espy-Wilson is a Fellow of the
Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (
IEEE). She
served as Chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the ASA from
2007 to 2010, as an associate editor of the ASA's magazine,
AcousticsToday, and as an appointed member of the Language and Communication
Study Section at NIH, 2001-2004. Currently, she is an Associate
Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, an
elected member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE
and a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical
Rehabilitation Research at NIH.
MIT Journey
Carol Espy-Wilson, the first
African-American woman to earn a PhD in electrical engineering at
MIT, is both an academic and an entrepreneur. A professor of
electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland and
a member of its Institute for Systems Research, she does research
that integrates engineering, linguistics, and speech science. She’s
also founder and CEO of
OmniSpeech, which improves voice clarity on
cell phones and other communication devices in noisy environments.
Espy-Wilson grew up in Atlanta, earned
her undergraduate degree at Stanford, and interned at Bell Labs.
After MIT, she taught at Boston University and then, in 2001, made
the move to UMD College Park. UMD’s Venture Accelerator program
urged her into entrepreneurship in 2009. “I was not thinking about
starting a company,” she says.
OmniSpeech targets emerging markets
that rely on inexpensive phones with poor sound filtering. “We use
the unique characteristics of speech to extract it from the noisy
signal, even if the noise is dynamic—like music, or people talking
in the background,” Espy-Wilson explains. “I’m really excited
about the potential to improve all kinds of communication devices,
including wearables, push-to-talk radios, and hearing aids.” MIT’s Speech Communication Group
shaped Espy-Wilson’s approach. “It was such a unique
group—engineers, linguists, phoneticians, and psycholinguists. We
even had a dentist who conducted research into speech motor control,”
she says. “I attribute the speech enhancement algorithm we
developed at OmniSpeech to that holistic background.”
Espy-Wilson’s husband, John Silvanus
Wilson, worked in development at MIT for 16 years, and the two were
housemasters at MacGregor House. He is now president of Morehouse
College in Atlanta. “We have a commuting marriage,” she says. “We
both want each other to realize our dreams, so that makes it a lot
easier to do this.” They have 26-year-old twin daughters and a
20-year-old son.
A Radcliffe fellowship brought
Espy-Wilson back to Cambridge in 2008, when she also served as a
Residential Scholar at Simmons Hall. And this past April, she
delivered the keynote address at the Black Alumni of MIT graduation
celebration: “I talked to them about finding their passion and
purpose, trusting that, as the Bible says, ‘If God be for us, who
can be against us,’ so that they will be courageous and take
risks—and the need for them to lift as they climb.”
Honors and Awards
• Institute of Systems
Research Fellow Award (2015 - 2017)
• University of Maryland
Distinguished Scholar-Teacher (2012 - 2013)
• Maryland Daily Record
Innovator of the Year Award (2010)
• Fellow of the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study (2008-2009)
• University of Maryland
Invention of the Year Award (2009)
• Acoustical Society of
America Fellow (2005)
• Honda Initiation Award
(2003-2004)
• NIH Independent Scientist
Award (1998-2003)
• Clare Booth Luce
Professorship (1990-1995)
• NSF Minority Initiation
Award (1990-1992)
Academic Degrees
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD, Electrical Engineering
1987
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SM, Electrical Engineering
1984
Stanford University
BS, Electrical Engineering
1979
Photo Credit: UMD
