Dr. Roland Alton-Scheidl

Dr. Roland Alton-Scheidl, (ras@pvl.at) is founder and managing director of PUBLIC VOICE Lab, an R&D co-op for media technologies located in Vienna, Europe. He had studied Computer Science and Media Art and was formerly working on Technology Assessment projects at the National Academy of Sciences. In the last eight years, he designed and developed PUBLIC VOICE's Audiotex service portfolio and acquired and managed a number of several million Euro sized R&D projects, such as Web4Groups, Senior Online, SELECT, StreamOntheFly or in the field of e-Democracy. He is committed to use and promote Open Source technologies and develops co-operative business models. He is also managing the InterMedia course at the University of Applied Sciences in Vorarlberg, Austria.

Soonthorn Ativanichayaphong

Soonthorn Ativanichayaphong is a Staff Software Engineer in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. He has worked with IBM for over 4 years. Soonthorn is one of the leading technical contributors for the Multimodal Browser development group. Previously, he worked on the first two releases of the Voice Toolkit for WebSphere Studio product, where he was responsible for the grammar editor component. Soonthorn was also a key member of IBM's original multimodal browser development team, having worked on the Voice In WAP Out (VIWO) and See What I Say (SWIS) architectures. He received a Master's degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from University of Florida.

back to the top

RJ Auburn

RJ Auburn, Chief Technology Officer, Voxeo Corporation drives Voxeo's significant technology leadership in the internet and voice solution industries, and also leads the research, evaluation, and design of Voxeo's carrier class Voice Centers. RJ is Editor and Chair of the W3C Call Control XML (CCXML) standard and working group, and oversees Voxeo's leadership contribution to VoiceXML, ENUM/DNS, and other industry standards. RJ is also an acknowledged expert in the fields of voice recognition, call center integration, and call control and conferencing. Prior to Voxeo, RJ was a Senior Consultant at Quality Call Solutions, a leading supplier of IVR and CTI solutions for the enterprise call center market. RJ frequently speaks at technology conferences throughout the United States RJ also maintains a blog covering news on the Voice over IP and Speech industries at http://www.rjauburn.com.

back to the top

Joni Brennan

Joni Brennan is finishing her B.A. studies of Information Technology and Informatics, at Rutgers University, School of Communication, Information and Library Sciences (SCILS) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She has focused her study on topics including: Information Visualization, Social Informatics and Web Development. She is currently Technical Services Assistant for the IEEE-ISTO. In this position she provides Technical and Communicational support for the VoiceXML Forum, the VoiceXML Review and the VoiceXML Forum Education Committee.

Dave Burke

Dr. Dave Burke is Chief Technology Officer at Voxpilot, where he is responsible for leading and implementing the overall technical direction and vision. Dave is an editor and contributor to W3C and IETF standards and a regular speaker at international speech conferences. Dave is author of "Speech Processing for IP Networks: Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP)", published by Wiley, and has written many papers in leading international academic journals and conferences. Dave holds a Ph.D., M.Eng.Sc., and B.E. in Electronic Engineering, all from the University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland.

Pavel Cenek

Pavel Cenek graduated at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic in 2000 and received master degree in mathematical informatics. He started and interrupted Ph.D. studies and currently is affiliated with a Norwegian applied research institute Norut IT. He is the principal designer and developer of the VoiceXML platform Elvira. His research interests are focused on human language technologies with stress to the dialogue systems and human-computer interfaces.

Dr. Deborah Dahl

Dr. Deborah Dahl is a consultant in speech technologies and their application to business solutions. Dr. Dahl chairs the W3C Multimodal Working Group and is a member of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group. Dr. Dahl is a frequent speaker at speech industry trade shows and is the editor of the recent book, "Practical Spoken Dialog Systems".

Bina Dames

Bina Dames is a Staff Software Engineer in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. She has worked with IBM for 5 years. Her current assignment is technical Test Development and Execution lead for the Multimodal Browser Test group and she has been involved in developing FVT, RDCs, and SVT test suites as well as testing the Multimodal Toolkit. Previously, she worked in the Embedded ViaVoice Test team in the areas of Accuracy, FVT, and SVT testing for various Embedded platforms and operating systems. Also, she was a software tester for Travel and Transportation and VisualAge for Jave IDE teams. She received her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from North Carolina Agricultural & Technological State University.

Peter Danielsen

Peter Danielsen is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Media Applications Research Department of Bell Laboratories. He was an editor of the W3C VoiceXML 2.0 Recommendation and has served as Lucent's representative on the VoiceXML Forum's Board of Directors.

Mark E. Eichten

Mark is a senior member of the eLoyalty Speech Solutions team.  His responsibilities include analytics, developing tuning tools and reports, voice user interface (VUI) design, managing implementation projects and designing and developing integrated applications that incorporate speech, touch-tone and live operator support.  He represents eLoyalty on the VoiceXML Forum's Tools Subcommittee.

Mark has over 7 years of speech application development experience along with 6 years of grammar development experience in GSL, GRXML and NLU.

Mark holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Management Information Systems from Creighton University.

Jonathan Engelsma

Jonathan Engelsma wrote his first voice-enabled application in 1995 when he worked in Motorola's Intelligent Network organization. He currently works at Motorola on Motorola's VoiceXML interpreter. Dr. Engelsma also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the VoiceXML Review e-zine and chairs the VoiceXML Forum's Education Committee. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at Michigan State University. Motorola is a founding member (Sponsor) of the VoiceXML Forum.

Jim Ferrans

Jim Ferrans has worked at Motorola since 1999 on the VoxGateway, an advanced VoiceXML 2.0 system that is source-licensed to voice platform vendors, voice hosting companies, and voice application companies. Jim was on the VoiceXML 1.0 design team, and is an editor of the VoiceXML 2.0 specification. He began his career at Lucent, where he was lead architect and language designer for an SQL-based database system. After a stint at Gould Research, he co-founded Vista Technologies in 1986, where he led the development of various software and hardware design tools. In 1996 Vista sold itself to Peritus, where Jim managed the development of several successful Y2K remediation tools.

back to the top

Peter Gavalakis

Peter Gavalakis, Chair of the VoiceXML Forum's Marketing Committee, manages product marketing and business development activities for speech and next-generation telephony products for Intel's Modular Communications Platform Division. He is currently driving several initiatives intended to advance the deployment of speech and IP-based solutions. Gavalakis held previous product and market management roles at Intel and Dialogic Corporation (acquired by Intel in 1999) in the SS7 and speech product areas.

back to the top

Stuart Harding

Stuart has a 20-year background in sales, business development, and operations with high technology companies. Prior to joining CoAssure, he worked in the areas of data networking and security. He served as Director of Business Development for SecuGen Corporation, a start-up in the field of biometric security, working toward partnerships with major corporations in the financial/banking industry and networking and security. Previously, Stuart worked for 5 years at Xyratex International where he initiated a successful Networking Division for high-speed test products. At Xyratex he last served as the Director of Business Development, but also held sales management positions. Before that, Stuart worked in the data storage industry for Read-Rite Corporation and ProQuip, Inc. in sales and account management. He started his career at Intel Corporation in operations and production planning. Stuart holds an MBA from Pepperdine University and a BA from the University of Mississippi.

back to the top

Christopher Harrick

Chris Harrick is currently a 2nd year MBA student at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. This past summer he worked as a MBA summer intern at IBM Corporation in Cambridge,MA as part of IBM's Extreme Blue internship program. He focused on analyzing the voice technology market. Before returning to school to pursue his MBA, Chris held various product marketing positions at Siebel Systems, a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management software.

back to the top

Igor Jablokov

As Program Director of IBM's multimodal and voice portal initiatives, Mr. Jablokov leads a worldwide team focused on developing speech technology for IBM's On Demand vision. His responsibilities include extending speech to perform enterprise transactions as well as enabling multimodality, a capability that allows users to intuitively access information through a variety of channels.

Additionally, he serves as a business mentor for IBM's Extreme Blue internship program and represents the Company on the board of directors for the VoiceXML Forum, an industry group driving an open standards-based vision of speech computing.

Previously, Mr. Jablokov held positions with IBM's Pervasive Computing, PartnerWorld, Global Industries and Microelectronics divisions. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from the University of North Carolina."

back to the top

Don Jackson

Don Jackson is Vice President of Advanced Telephony at Tellme Networks, where he works on enhancing the functionality and features of Tellme's connections to phone and data networks. His responsibilities include the SIP version of the Tellme platform and the development of communication applications for carriers and service providers.

back to the top

David Jaramillo

David Jaramillo is a Senior Software Engineer in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. He has worked with IBM for over 13 years. His current assignment is technical lead for the Multimodal Browser development group. Previously, David worked in the embedded ViaVoice® development team in the areas of telematics and hand-held for various embedded platforms and operating systems. In a previous life, David was one of the leading software engineers in the development of multiple releases of the OS/2 operating system. He received a Master's degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University.

back to the top

Jim Larson

Dr. James A. Larson is Manager, Advanced Human Input/Output for Intel Corporation. He is the co-chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group and member of the W3C Multimodal Working Group. He teaches courses in building speech applications and user centric design at Portland State University and at the Oregon Graduate Institute in Oregon Health and Sciences University. His book, VoiceXML--Introduction to Developing Speech Applications is available from Prentice Hall. Jim is a columnist for Speech Technology Magazine and co-program chair for Speech Technology Conference this September in New York City.

back to the top

Austin Lee

Austin Lee is an intern from the Georgia Institute of Technology working in the Embedded Voice Testing, part of the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. He has been with IBM since August 2002. His primary assignment has been developing tests for the Multimodal Browser project. In addition, he worked with the embedded ViaVoice team on the test execution and data analysis of the Korean language component. Currently, he is a graduating senior seeking B.S. degrees in Computer Science and in Mathematics.

back to the top

Peter Leppik

Peter Leppik is founder and CEO of Vocal Laboratories Inc. VocaLabs performs usability, market, and customer-satisfaction assessment of telephone-based services, using its panel of thousands of individuals to provide quality feedback to organizations with rapid turnaround time. Prior to founding VocaLabs in 2001, Mr. Leppik was an industry analyst at Dain Rauscher Wessels following companies providing call center and related technologies.

back to the top

Kam Lung Leung

In 2000, Kam Lung Leung founded Advanced Voice Technologies, one of a few initial firms pioneer in the Voice-Commerce system, for consumers and businesses Advanced Voice Technologies is actively involved in the VoiceXML Forum's Accessibility Committee, to champion accessibility issues, within the VoiceXML community.

back to the top

Benjamin Lewis

Benjamin Lewis is graduating from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business with an MBA in May 2005. Prior to entering school Benjamin started and sold BidCentives.com, a successful B2B marketing company. Benjamin spent his MBA internship at IBM in the Extreme Blue program where he worked with engineers to create a prototype multimodal application using IBM technology.

back to the top

Judith Markowitz

Dr. Judith A. Markowitz, Ph.D., is recognized internationally as one of the leading independent analysts in speech and speaker recognition. She is also known for her work on lexical-semantic networks. For over 20 years, she has provided technical and strategic consulting to clients, such as Motorola, FNMA, and Novell.

Dr. Markowitz is the president of J. Markowitz, Consultants and the Technology Editor of Speech Technology Magazine. She’s a member of the editorial review board of the International Journal of Speech Technology, the advisory board of the International Biometric Industry Association, and the VoiceXML Biometric SIG. In 2003, the readers of Speech Technology Magazine named her one of the top ten leaders in speech processing.

back to the top

Dr. Scott McGlashan

Scott McGlashan is CTO of Hewlett-Packard's OpenCall Media Platform, responsible for strategic media product planning including support for rich media applications in next generation networks. Over the past 15 years, Scott has pioneered the development of advanced user interface technologies, including speech, web, multimodal and mobile applications. He is also co-chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group which develops standards including VoiceXML, SRGS, SSML, CCXML and SCXML. He was previously CTO and co-founder of PipeBeach. Scott holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh.

back to the top

Rob Marchand

Rob Marchand is a Senior Director of Product Management for Genesys Telecommunications Inc. Rob has been working with markup-based dialog languages since 1995, including contributions to VoiceXML and CCXML, and has worked in advanced computing and telecommunications since 1985.  At Genesys, Rob is responsible for the evolution of the Genesys Voice Platform product line.  Prior to the acquisition of VoiceGenie Technologies by Genesys, Rob was responsible for VoiceGenie Product Management,  and the on-line VoiceGenie Developer Workshop (http://developer.voicegenie.com).  Rob is a member of the VoiceXML Education Committee, represents Genesys on the VoiceXML Forum Board of Directors, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. Genesys Telecommunications Labs, an Alcatel Company, is a Sponsor Member of the VoiceXML Forum.

back to the top

Brent Metz

Brent D. Metz is a staff software engineer at IBM in Boca Raton , Florida working on IBM's WebSphere Voice Toolkit. He is a domain expert in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies, speech user interface design and speech tooling design. He represents IBM on the VoiceXML Forum's Tools Subcommittee and is the administrative lead for the open source Eclipse Voice Tools project. Brent received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Virginia Tech. Prior to joining IBM, Brent was the grand prize winner of the Cool Blue VoiceXML Challenge, an international VoiceXML application design competition.

back to the top

Richard Miranti

Richard Miranti is an Advisory Software Engineer in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. He has over 19 years of software development experience at IBM working in various capacities. Rich is currently working as a technical writer with emphasis on programming guides. Rich received a Bachelor s degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University and a Masters Degree in Business from New York Institute of Technology. In his spare time Rich enjoys a leisurely bike ride along the beaches of South Florida.

back to the top

Matt Oshry

Matt Oshry is a regular columnist for the Speak & Listen column in the VoiceXML Review. Matt is currently the Content Manager at Tellme Networks. Previously, Matt spent seven years at Microsoft writing technical documentation.

back to the top

David Pearce

David Pearce Leads a team in Speech and Multimodal Interfaces within Motorola Labs (UK). He has 20 years experience contributing to research in the area of speech recognition and synthesis and multimodal interfaces. He is chairman of the ETSI Aurora DSR working group responsible for the creation of international standards for Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) and the raporteur for Speech Enabled Services (SES) in 3GPP SA4 (codecs).

back to the top

Brad Porter

Brad Porter joined Tellme as the company's fifth employee. He developed Tellme's original VoiceXML interpreter and served as Platform Architect responsible for overseeing system scalability and VoiceXML interpreter development initiatives. He serves on the W3C standards committee as an editor of VoiceXML 2.0 and a lead architect for their Multimodal initiatives. Within Tellme's Office of the CTO, Brad is directly involved in strategic platform and product work. Before joining Tellme, Brad helped architect Netscape Netcenter's personalization and cobranding infrastructure. Brad is graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a Master's of Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science.

back to the top

Kenneth G. Rehor is co-creator of the voice-enabled Web architecture and technology. While with the Bell Laboratories Research division of Lucent Technologies (previously part of AT&T), he built the first web-based telephony platform in 1995, and is co-author of Bell Labs' Phone Markup Language. These formed the basis for AT&T's PhoneWeb service, Lucent's TelePortal platform, and Motorola's VoxML language, predecessors to VoiceXML. He led Lucent's creation of the VoiceXML Forum and was co-author of VoiceXML 1.0. Ken is active in both the VoiceXML Forum, leading a subcommittee on conformance testing applications, and the W3C Voice Browser Working Group, as one of the editors of VoiceXML 2.0. He was most recently Chief Technology Officer of Enuncia Communications, a provider of VoiceXML servers and tools. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, and Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

back to the top

Claudia Romellini

Claudia Romellini received her degree in Computer Science from the University of Torino. In 1988 she joined CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni of Telecom Italia). Where her working experiences have been in the areas of WEB application development applied to document management systems and Information Retrieval engines. She also managed several projects either in the domestic market and in the international cooperation contextIn 2000 she took the responsibility of HTML voice browser integration in Loquendo and of specific voice service development projects. Today she is currently responsible of the development of tools supporting all Loquendo products, especially concerning VXML support. She is also responsible of Loquendo Training programs and of Loquendo Café' WEB site, a site offering free resources for the VXML developer comunity.

back to the top

Ian Sutherland

back to the top

Rakesh Tailor

Rakesh Tailor graduated from the University of Waterloo, which is located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, with a B.A.Sc. in Computer Engineering. At VoiceGenie, Rakesh has managed the design, development and deployment of various developer tools including the VoiceGenie Developer Workshop (http://developer.voicegenie.com), SpeechGenie Workshop (http://www.speechgenie.com) as well as VoiceGenie's VoiceXML development environment, GenieIDE. Currently, Rakesh is leading VoiceGenie's efforts in designing and developing the next generation of OA&M tools for VoiceGenie's industry leading VoiceXML Platform.

back to the top

Andrea Rutherfoord

Andrea Rutherfoord is a technical writer (contractor) in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. She has written documentation at IBM for over 5 years on various speech and handwriting recognition products. Her current assignment includes writing documentation for multiple releases of the Voice Toolkit, Multimodal Toolkit, and Multimodal Browser. Previously, she was a technical writer for another software development company, a professor at DeVry University, and the author of two textbooks on writing in vocational fields. She received her Master's degrees from Florida International University and Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. from Georgia State University.

back to the top

Mark Scott

Mark Scott is Vice President of Development at Genesys Telecommunication Labs Inc., which he joined through its acquisition of VoiceGenie, where Mark served as CTO from 2002. At Genesys, Mark continues to focus on the capabilities, architecture, and design of standards-based voice platform products. Mark holds an M.A.Sc in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, has 5 patents in the area of VoIP, and contributes to W3C and IETF standards.

back to the top

Manish Sharma

Manish Sharma, Ph. D., Director Product Planning and Strategy, Nortel. Nortel is a leading global provider of innovative Multimedia Communications Applications.

In his role Dr. Sharma is responsible for Nortel's product roadmap and strategy for Voice  portal, Contact Center, Unified Messaging and Multimedia conferencing solutions. Manish focuses on developing multi-year roadmap and new program content to address emerging business opportunities and deliver innovative solutions. Prior to joining Nortel, Sharma was Vice President of Advanced Technology Research at T-NETIX Inc., responsible for SpeakEZ Voice Verification product development. He was also a co-founder of SpeakEZ Inc., a spin-off venture from Rutgers University, with verification products acquired by Nuance.

Manish earned a doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey, holds several patents, and is published widely in the area of speech  technologies. Manish was also voted as one of the "Top 10 Leaders in Speech" by Speech  Technology magazine. He is currently the Chair of VOiceXML forum's Marketing and Communications committee. He is also on the Editorial Advisory board of Speech Technology magazine.

back to the top

David L. Thomson

David Thomson has worked 18 years in speech compression, recognition, and synthesis and chairs the VoiceXML Tools Committee. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Brigham Young University in 1983. He received his MSEE, also from BYU, and joined AT&T Bell Labs (later Lucent) in 1984. He received a Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer of the Year Honorable Mention in 1994. He has eight U.S. patents and has authored or coauthored over 20 technical papers.

back to the top

Roberto Vila

Roberto Vila is a Software Engineer in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division in Boca Raton, FL. He has worked at IBM for over 2 years on various embedded speech projects. His current position is development lead of IBM's Java Speech API (JSAPI) implementation of Embedded ViaVoice. Previously, Roberto was responsible for testing Embedded ViaVoice and the Multimodal Browser on various platforms and languages. He received his Bachelor's degree with distinction in Computer Science from Duke University and is currently completing his Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

back to the top

Andrew Wahbe

Andrew Wahbe is the Technical Manager of the Multimodal and Developer Tools group at Genesys. He leads a team that is responsible for delivering tools to facilitate speech application development and deployment, as well as extending Genesys' platform to support multimodal applications. Prior to Genesys, Andrew was the System Architect for AOL's Voice Services Division which developed the AOLbyPhone consumer voice portal and the AOL Voicemail unified messaging system. Andrew has a B.Math in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and a M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

back to the top

Marc White

Marc White is a Staff Software Engineer in the IBM Pervasive Computing Division, Boca Raton, FL. With over 14 years of experience in software development, more than three of them at IBM, Marc is currently working on the Multimodal Browser development. Previously, Marc worked on the first three versions of IBM s continuous dictation product, ViaVoice for the Macintosh®. In his spare time Marc enjoys disc golf and hanging out at the beaches in sunny South Florida.

back to the top

Tiemo Winterkamp

Tiemo Winterkamp is Vice President of Strategy and Market Research at VoiceObjects, the worldwide leader in Voice Application Management Systems (VAMS). The VoiceObjects X5 product portfolio enables companies to easily create, test, deploy and analyze voice applications with the industry's best IDE on a carrier-grade, server-based platform. The company has strategic partners worldwide, including Comverse, Danet, Genesys, IBM, NextiraOne, SAP, Softlab, T-Com, T-Systems and VoiceGenie. The company is headquartered in Cologne, Germany and has offices in the United States and in the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit www.voiceobjects.com.

back to the top