John Ohala Wins ASA Silver Medal in Speech

John Ohala, a distinguished scholar in the Speech Group, has received the Silver Medal in Speech Communication from the Acoustical Society of America, or ASA. In announcing the award, the ASA cited Ohala’s work in advancing the understanding of speech production and perception, and applying phonetic principles to the study of spoken language change over time. Ohala is an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley, which he joined in 1970 as a professor of linguistics. He has been involved with speech processing efforts at ICSI for decades, participating in a major workshop at ICSI in 1990 on the front-end of speech recognition systems and joining ICSI as an advisor in 1996.

The Silver Medal recognizes contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles or through research accomplishments in acoustics.