Chin-Hui Lee and Nicholas Dimitrios Sidiropoulos are recognized for research advancing voice recognition, wireless communications and sensing.
From the foundational speech recognition technologies powering modern voice assistants to innovation in advanced sensing, IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization and public charity advancing technology for humanity, announced the recipients of two 2027 IEEE Technical Field Awards sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL): the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing.
For pioneering contributions to and leadership in automatic speech and speaker recognition – including innovations in adaptive learning and discriminative training that helped shape modern speech-enabled systems – Chin-Hui Lee, Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, has been named the recipient of the 2027 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.
For groundbreaking contributions to algebraic signal processing, optimization, and multidimensional harmonic retrieval that have advanced wireless communications, sensing, and data analytics, the 2027 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing has been awarded to Nicholas Dimitrios Sidiropoulos, Louis T. Rader Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia.
Chin-Hui Lee
Lee has been a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology since 2002. Earlier in his career, he worked at Bell Laboratories, where he received the Bell Labs President’s Gold Award in 1998 for his contributions to the Lucent Speech Processing Solutions product. He earned his bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University, a master’s degree from Yale University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Lee is an IEEE Life Fellow and a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), with more than 600 published papers and 30 patents. In 2007, he received the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Achievement Award. His research in automatic speech and speaker recognition, speech enhancement, and acoustic signal processing has played a crucial role in enabling modern voice-driven technologies.
Nicholas Dimitrios Sidiropoulos
Sidiropoulos serves as Louis T. Rader professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia, where he also served as department chair from 2017 to 2021. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He earned his diploma in electrical engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Sidiropoulos is an IEEE Fellow whose research spans signal processing theory and algorithms, wireless communications, optimization, and machine learning, with an emphasis on matrix and tensor decomposition methods. He has received multiple IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Awards, the Society’s Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award, and its Meritorious Service Award. His work has advanced algebraic signal processing and multidimensional harmonic retrieval, influencing communications, sensing, and data analytics worldwide.
The IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing honor the legacies of pioneers whose innovations transformed speech, audio, and signal processing technologies. Together, they recognize outstanding technical achievement and leadership in speech recognition, signal processing, sensing, and communications.
For more information, visit corporate-awards.ieee.org/current-recipients.
