Kate Knill

Dr Kate Knill is a Principal Research Associate at Cambridge University. She primarily works on spoken language teaching and assessment within the ALTA Institute, where she is the Principal Investigator for the ALTA Spoken Language Processing Technology Project. Previously she worked on the rapid development of speech systems for new languages on the BABEL and MATERIAL (IARPA funded) projects.

She received a 1st class B.Eng. (Jt Hons) degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Nottingham in 1990 and a Ph.D. degree from Imperial College, London University, London, U.K., in 1994. Her doctoral thesis was in the area of Adaptive Digital Signal Processing, supervised by Prof. Anthony Constantinides. Kate was sponsored on both degrees and a pre-university year by Marconi Underwater Systems Ltd.

She has worked in speech technology since 1993. From 1993 to 1996, she was a Research Associate in the Speech Vision and Robotics Group in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University working on audio document retrieval, supervised by Prof. Steve Young and funded by HP Labs, Bristol. She joined the Speech R & D team of Nuance Communications in 1997. As Languages Manager (2000 - 2002), she led a cross-site team that developed over 20 languages for speech recognition and speaker verification. In 2002, she established a new Speech Technology Group at Toshiba Research Europe, Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL), Cambridge, U.K. As Assistant Managing Director and Speech Technology Group Leader she was responsible for interactive technology, in particular core speech recognition and synthesis R & D and development of European and North American speech products. The Cambridge team led the creation of new speech recognition and speech synthesis engines for Toshiba for which Kate served as project lead across sites in the UK, Japan and China.

Kate is a member of the IEEE, IET and ISCA. She was a member of the ISCA Board (2013-2021) and was Secretary of ISCA (2017-2021). She is a member of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award committee. She was a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee from 2009-2012. She was Co-Lead Technical Chair for ASRU 2021 and will be a Technical Chair for Interspeech 2023. She was an Area Chair for Interspeech 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2020, 2021 and 2022, and Publications Co-Chair for SLT 2012, and is an Associate Editor for EURASIP Journal of Audio, Speech and Music Processing. Kate chaired the technical sub-committee of the Digital TV Group (DTG) Usability Text-to-Speech Synthesis sub group.