ESCA always tries to give her ESCA-medal every two years to a very special person. In 1989 this was Gunnar Fant, in 1991 it was Jim Flanagan, and in 1993 it was Adrian Fourcin. This time it will be prof. Ken Stevens, head of the Speech Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very special person indeed.
He has a special appearance, with his beautiful white hair and beard and his athletic body, he is a special person with his friendly character, and above all he is a special scientist, with his natural leadership, his great devotion to students, and his pioneering research activities for well over 40 years.
I have the special privilege of knowing him for some 20 years by now and I have met him at various memorable occasions. These events are rather characteristic for his personality, so I will somewhat emphasize on these, but I will mention some of the "basic" facts first:
He was born in Toronto in 1924 (yes indeed, this young guy is already over 70). He started his study in Toronto, but got his Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1952. His doctoral thesis on "The perception of sound shaped by resonant cicuits" was supervised by Leo Beranek (yes, the Beranek from BBN, Bolt, Beranek and Newman) and he became a full professor in 1963. Ken was a consultant of BBN for 35 years. Since 1977 he holds the LeBel chair. He is the head of the Speech Group, a research team of 8 faculty and staff, plus several graduate students and doctoral fellows, and he runs that lab, that is housed in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, in a remarkably smooth way.
He received various honors and awards, of which the most appealing ones to me are his presidency of the Acoustical Society of America in 1976-1977, the silver medal in Speech Communication that he got in 1983 "for his contribution to our understanding of the production, acoustic-phonetic properties, and the perception of speech, and how we may join speech and technology in ways useful to man", and on top of that in May this year in Detroit the prestigious ASA gold medal "for leadership and outstanding contributions to the acoustics of speech production and perception".
All three preceding ESCA-medal recipients have a strong relation with Ken: Jim Flanagan can be counted as his first Ph.D. student, Ken was a visiting professor at Adrian Fourcin's UCL, and with Gunnar Fant he worked together for extended periods of time, just as with people like Morris Halle, Arthur House, Lou Braida, Jonathan Allen, Dennis Klatt, Sheila Blumstein, Jay Keyser, Joe Perkell, and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. His list of graduate students and postdocs working with him, is impressive indeed. To mention just a few names: Alan Oppenheim, Hiroya Fujisaki, Larry Rabiner, Tom Baer, Victor Zue, Stephanie Seneff, Corine Bickley, Pat Keating, Ann Syrdal, Patti Price, Pat Kuhl, Shinji Maeda, and Jacqueline Vaissiere. Ken was at least partly responsible for the last two to come together, and their son, Kenji, is named after him.
Ken himself of course also realizes how inspiring it can be to be surrounded all the time by so many talented people. Upon a request to him about what he liked most about the RLE lab he reacted, according to a quote in the first issue of RLE Currents: The thing I like most is the proximity of colleagues who are in fileds related to mine, and who are among the very best in the world - people who really understand hearing, people who understand linguistics and acoustics - and to interact with these people and with such very good students. ThatÕs what makes the place exciting.
In searching for interesting facts about Ken for this special occasion, Jacqueline Vaissiere reminded me of the poem she wrote, on behalf of all foreign students and visitors of the Speech Group at MIT, on the occasion of the so-called Invariane symposium in October 1983. That symposium was dedicated to Ken for his 60th birthday. I will read the first verse:
Celui que nous fêtons aujourd'hui a trois fois vingt ans
Professeur Ken Stevens, que nous respectons tous autant.
Saississons l'occasion pour témoigner notre gratitude
A qui sait enseigner avec une si grande aptitude.
Pour tous les étrangers que son groupe a accueillis,
Et pour tous les bons conseils qu'ils ont ici recueillis,
Et pour la bonne atmosphère qu'ils ont connue ainsi
Vielen Dank, gracias, arigato, tak-tak et merci.
Jacqueline added to this that it was easy to be inspired by him, because he really is an exceptional person, an exceptional teacher, and a real gentleman. And, with apologies to all other male researchers, she confessed that she had never met a man more charming than Ken.
I myself was also very much inspired by this Symposium on the "Invariance and variability in speech processes". When I had to choose a research theme for my new activities at the University of Amsterdam, I felt that I could not do better than to choose this topic as the "Leitmotiv" for our future research.
Earlier on, at the so-called SCAMP Workshop in Williamstown in 1981, where Ken was also an active participant, I became impressed by his ideas. There also I saw him bicycling in his characteristic way, and I realize that this has been his favorite way of transport in Cambridge for many years. He is also a faithful and durable jogger, and I read somewhere that over the last 45 years he must have run some 13,500 miles!
In July 1989 I witnessed Ken's appearance at the Cape Cod Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition. He felt completely at ease between all the technical recognition people and proposed his ideas about distinctive features, especially for lexical representation and quick lexical access. He emphasized the importance of the event-oriented approach rather than segment- or frame-oriented. Not everybody agreed with his ideas but they were always a scientific challenge.
This was also clear from the 1989 special issue of the Journal of Phonetics, devoted to Ken Stevens' Quantal theory, with many supportive and critical contributions from his colleagues.
Ken has been a very productive scientist indeed, and has performed pioneering research in all areas of speech production, analysis, synthesis, perception, and recognition. His early papers with Arthur House are classics. He covered such themes as: the structure of speech sounds, the non-linear relation between articulator movement and the acoustic signal that it produces, distinctive features, physics and aerodynamics of sound generation, perceptual studies on invariant features, work in speech synthesis on modeling the time-varying shape of the vocal tract, but also topics like circuit theory, the acceptability of noise, or speaker identification.
Since 1950 he published some 40 papers in JASA alone, not to speak about all the other journals!!
One additional reason for honoring him here and now by the European Speech Comunication Association is his special relationship with Europe. He is a frequent visitior to conferences and workshops in this part of the world. He was a visiting professor at University College London in 1969, he gave lecture series and spent a sabbatical year in Stockholm, he made a summer visit to the Institute of Perception Research IPO in Eindhoven, and made several visits to the Centro da Linguistica in Lisbon. Last month he participated in the XIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Stockholm and before that was actively involved in a synthesis workshop. Some of his best students have prominent positions now in Europe, such as Shinji Maeda, Christine Shadle, and Jacqueline Vaissiere. Many of our best European researchers have visited him and worked with him, I just mention Rolf Carlson, René Carré, Maria-Gabriella DiBenedetto, Maria Gosy, Gunnar Fant, Sheri Hunnicutt, Bertil Lyberg, our chairman of this conference Jose-Manuel Pardo, and Victor Sorokin. He served on various thesis committees, especially in Sweden, for instance for Johan Liljencrants, Bjorn Lindblom, and Sven Öhman.
What more reasons can I give you to convince everybody that he, and only he, is the best person to receive this year our prestigious ESCA-medal. I am convinced that in his lecture on "Applying phonetic knowledge to lexical access" that will follow soon, he will demonstrate to us again his great scholarship and the scientific depth of his ideas.
It is with great pleasure that I can present you now this beautiful ESCA-medal, and I wish you many more productive years in good health.