Shinji Watanabe

Associate Professor, Language Technologies Institute

Shinji Watanabe is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI), where his research focuses on advancing speech processing, conversational AI, and end-to-end neural models for speech and language applications. He has made groundbreaking contributions to areas such as speech recognition, speech translation, speaker diarization, and speech enhancement. As the leader of the widely used ESPnet open-source toolkit, Dr. Watanabe has developed state-of-the-art tools for end-to-end speech processing, garnering significant recognition in the research and developer communities. His work has been presented at leading venues, including Interspeech and ICASSP.

Dr. Watanabe earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Waseda University, where his research centered on Bayesian approaches to speech recognition. He has held positions at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), and Johns Hopkins University before joining CMU. Dr. Watanabe has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles, many of which have received accolades, such as the Best Paper award from Interspeech in 2024 and EMNLP in 2024. He has also been recognized as an IEEE and ISCA Fellow for his fundamental contributions to speech recognition research and leadership.

At CMU, Dr. Watanabe teaches advanced courses such as "Speech Technology for Conversational AI" and "Speech Recognition and Understanding," mentoring a diverse group of students and postdoctoral researchers. He actively serves the research community as an area chair or committee member for top conferences and chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC). Through his research, teaching, and service, Dr. Watanabe continues to push the boundaries of speech technology and conversational AI.

Research Areas