Alex Acero

Large Language Models: past, present, and future

BIO

Alex Acero is Distinguished Scientist at Zoom, heading AI Incubations. He is also AI Venture Partner at Cadenza Capital, and affiliate professor in the ECE Department at the University of Washington. Until 2024, he was Senior Distinguished Engineer and Siri Chief Scientist at Apple, leading speech recognition, speech synthesis, and on-device language understanding for Siri, the first mainstream voice assistant. His team contributed to several Apple features including dictation, Voice Control for motor skills impaired users, screen readers for vision impaired users, and spoken navigation in CarPlay. These technologies are used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide for Siri, dictation, and accessibility, handling 10 billion utterances every week. Prior to joining Apple in 2013, he spent 20 years at Microsoft Research managing teams in speech, audio, multimedia, computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, machine learning, and information retrieval. His team at Microsoft Research shipped Bing Translator, contributed to Xbox Kinect and demonstrated the superiority of deep neural networks over mixtures of Gaussians for large vocabulary speech recognition, which helped jump-start the deep learning revolution.

Dr. Acero is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of IEEE, ISCA, AASF, and AAIS. He is the recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Technical Field Award, the IEEE Signal processing Society Norbert Wiener Award. He received best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and CIKM. Alex is author of the textbook “Spoken Language Processing”, over 230 technical papers and 160 US patents. Alex has served in the Board of Directors of IEEE and IEEE Foundation, and as President of IEEE Signal Processing Society. Alex serves in UW ECE Advisory Board, IDIAP’s International Advisory Council, Stony Brook University’s Industry Advisory Board, and previously served in boards including EPSRC Natural Speech Technology Advisory board and CMU College of Engineering. Alex received a PhD from Carnegie Mellon.