BEST PATH RESEARCH - Key Persons
Dr. Edward Whittaker has over 25 years of experience in pattern recognition and machine learning.
He received his PhD in Statistical Language Modelling for Speech Recognition from the Cambridge University Engineering Department in 2000 where he was involved with the HTK broadcast news and conversational telephone speech transcription systems that consistently won the DARPA/NIST HUB4 and HUB5 evaluations in the late 90s.
After graduation Dr. Whittaker pursued post-doctoral research from 2000-2003 at the world-renowned Compaq Cambridge Research Laboratory (formerly DEC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Philips Research Labs in Aachen, Germany. In 2003 Dr. Whittaker came to Japan to work at the Furui Laboratory in the Tokyo Institute of Technology. While there he continued his research into speech recognition and the development of a language-independent statistical approach to natural language question answering, a precursor to today's purely data-driven machine learning approaches to the same problem.
Dr. Whittaker's first company was formed in 2007 and was the first in Japan to develop a voice-activated train timetable search app in both English and Japanese for the recently-released iPhone. The app was sold to a major Japanese corporation and is still being actively used more than twelve years later. While helping develop various bespoke machine learning solutions for a number of clients in Japan he has also been an external developer and consultant at one of Japan's largest internet companies.
Dr. Whittaker is the author, or co-author, on over 60 academic papers as well as several patents in the areas of compression and speech recognition. He currently also holds a part-time lecturing position at the University of Tokyo where he teaches a class on research and academic writing in the graduate school of Computer Science.
Dr. Hans Dolfing has over 30 years experience in the fields of software engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence and biometrics. He graduated with a PhD thesis on the topic of handwriting recognition and verification and has worked in Europe and Silicon Valley on speech and handwriting recognition and verification, natural language processing, as well as signature verification, historical handwritten manuscripts, optical character recognition (OCR) and many other, surprising input signals. He contributes to industry and academic efforts, workshops and conferences from UNIPEN to JSALT. A distinguished industry career with many papers, patents and applications, from dedicated software solutions on tiny platforms, to applications for millions in daily life, in startups as well as large companies, visiting scientist at MIT, and experience with embedded and cloud-based AI.