丁he Vrinners of the Okawa Prize
C■ ation
For pioneering contributions to and leadership:n the field of computer‐based speech recognition and understanding

Dr.Sadaoki Furul
Positions and Organizat:ons:
Professor Eme五 tus,Professor,Acacemy for Grobal Lcadership,
Dttector,University Contents Utilization Center,

Tokyo hstitute of Technology(TokyO Tech)word recognition.Today this approach is adopted in most of the speech
recognition systerrls(produCtS)in the world.In addition,noting that voice
differences among speakers and speech varlability due to background noise
are ilnportant factors dilninishing speech recognition performance,heconfimed expe」 irnentally the extremely high adaptability of human hearlng
and proposed various fundamental techniques for bringing such adaptation

Doctorate :Ph.D。 (The Univ.of Tokyo,1978)

capability to computers.
The dynanlic cepstrllrn is also a key parameter in speech synthesis using aDate of Birth:septerrlber 9,1945

hidden Markov model(HMM)fOr parameter generation,a subject ofBrief Biography:

Recognizing the problems of studying speech recognition and understanding
based on voices reading a written text,he noted the importance of studies
for developing speech recognition technologies applicable to naturally

worldwide research Hl recent years.

1968

BoS.,in Mathematical EngineeHng and lnstrumentation Physics,
The Univo of Tokyo

1970

M.S.,The Univ.of Tokyo

1970 Rescarcher lrlthe Elect五 cal Comunications Labs.of Nippon

Telegraph and Telephonc(NTT)Corporation
1978‑1979

Visiting researcher,IBell Labs.

1986 Hcad of Section No.4,Nl刃『 Basic Research Labs.
1989 Director of Speech and Acoustics Lab。 ,NTT Human
hterface Labs.
1991 Director of Furlli Research Lab。 ,NTT Hulman hterface Labs.
1997 Prof。 ,lDept.of Computer Science,Graduate School oflhfomation

spoken languageo ln order to advance research in this area,he led a project,funded by the Minister of Education,Culture,Sports,Science andTechnology Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science andTechnology,toward the realization of Spontaneous Speech Engineering。
This prttect COmpiled Corpus of Spontaneous Japanesc(CSJ),the WOrld's
largest and rnost accurate database of spontaneous speech,consisting of 7
million words.Based on this database,the prQject developed phoneme andlanguage rnodels and speech recognition inethods.As a result,recognition

accuracy of spontaneous speech,which up to that tilnc had proven2009 Director,Tokyo Tech Library and Tokyo Tech Archive lnitiative
201l Prof。 ,Errle五 tus and hstitutc Prof.,Tokyo Tech2012 Prof。 ,Errle五 tus and Prof.,Tokyo Techextremely difficult,was greatly improved.Moreover,the prtteCt prOposed
automatic speech summarization technology,for extracting fronl speech
recognition results the most important sentences based on the infomation
weight(signifiCance)Of WOrds,reliability,and grammatical and semantic
correctness,and then automatically compressing each sentence.The CSJ asa standard speech corpus has been put to wide use by researchers andC)ther:engineers in Japan and abroad in creating acoustic and language rnodels for

Science and Engineettg,Tokyo Tech

2007

Dean ofthe Graduate School oflnfomation Science andEngineering,Tokyo Tech

Fe1low ofIEEE,ASA(Acoustical Society of Ame五 ca),various speech recognition and understanding systems,with inore than

ISCA(IntematiOnal Speech Communication Association),
hstitute of Electronics,Homation and Corrmunication
Engineers of Japan(IEICE)As Tokyo lnstitute of Technology Lcader of the five― ycar 21st Century

President of ISCA,APSIPA(Asia― Pacific Signal and L」 orrnation

Application of Large― scale Knowledge Resources,'l he helped to promote

Processing Association),and Acoustical Society of Japan(ASJ)
Collaborative Member,Science Council of Japan

interdisciplinary research combining humanities and technology on thel,000 academic Papers published to date rnaking use ofthis corpus,

Center of Excellencc(COE)Program"Framework for Systematization andcompilation and utilization of large―

scale knowledge resources in electronicforrns,leading to numerous achievements.

Main Awards and Honors:

In the area of applications,he served as leader of the METI Project

1985 and 1987 ASJ Sato Paper Award
1988,1993,and 2003 1EICE Best Paper Award"Development of Fundamental Speech Recognition Technology‖
carned out
jointly by two universities and four companies,This prtteCt achieved a1989
1989

Minister of Sciencc and Technology Achievement Award1]EEE Acoustics,Speech and Signal Processing Society Senior

number of results including development of the T3 deCOder,aAward(Best Paper Award)

WFST(weighted finite state transducers)。 Made available as open source,

1991 1EICE Best Book Award
1993

1EEE Signal Processing Society]Distinguished Lecturer

high― performance and flexible speech recognition engine operating on

the T3 deCOder is used by many research institutions in Japan and overseas.

Hc has also contributed to the development of NHK's automatic closed

2003 1EICE Achievelment Award

captioning systenl for broadcast speech.

2006

Minister of Education,Culture,Sports,Science and Technology
Conllnendation for Science and Technology

In recognition of these and lnany other accomplishments,E)r.Furui has
received numerous awards in Japan including the Purple Ribbon Medal of2006 1EEE Signal Processing Society Award
2006 Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor
2008 1EICE Distinguished Achievement and ConmbutiOns Award
2009 1SCA Medal for Scientific Achievement
2010 1EEE Janles L.Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award
2012 NHK Broadcasting Culture Award

Honor presented by the Emperor of Japan,the Minister of Education,Main Achievements:

Culture,Sports,Sciencc and Technology{Corrlinendation for Sciencc andTeclmology,and the NHK Broadcasting Culture Award,as well as some of
the top intemational awards in speech infomation processing such as theISCA Medal and IEEE Flanagan Award.Hc has also served as President,Director,IEditor and in other positions in academic institutions in Japan andabroad,contnbuting to interrlational acaderruc activities.

Both atthe NTT Laboratories and at the Tokyo lnstitute of Technology,hehas educated researchers and students fronl around 30 countries,Inany ofE)ro Sadaoki Furui over the course of his long career has been engaged inwhorrl have gone on to be active throughout the world as teachers,

research at the international level on speech information processing,inparticular computer― based speech recognition and understanding.Hc has
proposed fundamental technologies in this area and contributed to theresearchers,and engineers in rnultiinedia infomation processing including

speech.Hc has also visited around 40 countries to give technicalspeech dynarnic features in human speech perception,and proposed apresentations,lectures,and technical instruction or take part in joint
research,and has been selected as I〕 istinguished Lecturer by the IEEE andISCA.Dr.Furuils book Dな jι αJ Speecλ Prο cessjれ 3 Syπ ιλesjtt αんαRccogん jι jο ん (1989,latest edition published in 2001 by Marcel Dekker)iswidely regarded intemationally as an introduction to speech information

method of speech recognition that analyzes those dynarFliC features in theprocessing for young researchers.

speech signal spectrurrl by obtaining regression coefficients from thecepstral time se五 es(dynamic cepstrllm)and then combining instantaneousand dynamic cepstrllm pararneters.This method led to mttor improvements
in recognition perfomance,nearly halving the number of errors in spoken

For pioneering contributions to and leadership in the field ofadvance of the technology while also helping to educate numerous
researchers.

Among the mttOr fruits of his research,he revealed the important role ofcomputer―based speech recognition and understanding,both in Japan andllltemationally,E)r.Sadaoki Furlliis hereby awarded the(Dkawa Prize。