Joseph Keshet
Joseph (Yossi) Keshet (Hebrew: יוסי קשת; born: 28 February 1973) is an Israeli professor in the Computer Science Department at Bar-Ilan University, and head of the Speech, Language and Deep Learning Laboratory. Early life and education. Keshet was born in Tel-Aviv. He graduated from the Amal School and began his academic studies at the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems at Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and received his B.Sc. (Cum Laude) in 1994. Keshet served in the IDF Unit 8200 from 1995 to 2002 as the head of the speech processing research section in the R&D  Center. During his service, he received a national award from the Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (Maf’at). Keshet was award his M.Sc. from the same department after he completed his Israel Defense Force service in 2002. His Dissertation was titled: "Stop consonant spotting in continuous speech" and was supervised by Dan Chazan from IBM Research Labs, Haifa. He continued his Ph.D. studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 2008. Prof. Yoram Singer supervised his thesis on Large Margin Algorithms for Discriminative Continuous Speech. Career. Keshet was a Research Associate (postdoc) at IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny , Switzerland in 2007, and joined the TTI-Chicago and Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL in 2009 as Research Assistant Professor. In 2013 he returned to Israel and joined the Computer Science department at Bar-Ilan University, where he is currently a professor and head of the Speech, Language, and Deep Learning Lab. In 2020 Keshet became a Founding Venture Partner at the Disruptive AI Venture Capital. In the same year, he also joined Amazon in Tel-Aviv as an Amazon Scholar. Research. Keshet's research work focuses on both machine learning and computational study of human  speech and language. His work on speech and language concentrates on speech processing, speech recognition, acoustic phonetics, and pathological speech. In machine learning, Keshet is focused on deep learning and structured tasks. According to Google Scholar (September 2020), Keshet is one of the 15 most cited researchers in the field of spoken language processing. The algorithms that were developed in the Speech, Language, and Deep Learning Lab can analyze different pathological conditions in the throat and vocal cords based on the subject's voice. Other algorithms showed that the voice can be used to estimate physical and emotional state of  the speaker. Another research led by Keshet suggested that it is possible to fool structured AI systems (like Google Voice). Membership in professional societies. Keshet is the founder and chair of the Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing Special Interest Group (SIGML) of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), from 2011. He is a senior member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 2018 and a member of ISCA since 2002. Publications. Prof. Keshet has authored more than 70 scientific publications and edited one book. Book. Joseph Keshet and Samy Bengio, Eds., Automatic Speech and Speaker Recognition: Large Margin  and Kernel Methods, John Wiley & Sons, March 2009. Personal life. Keshet is married to Lital. They have three children.