creation of industries Michael Phillips

• CEO, Sense • Founder, Vlingo • Co-founder, SpeechWorks

BIO: Mike Phillips is the CEO of Sense, a Cambridge-based company developing intelligent devices and applications for the home. Mike previously founded SpeechWorks in 1994, which applied emerging speech recognition technology to the call center industry and had an IPO in August 2000. In 2006, Mike founded Vlingo which developed the first voice-based virtual assistant applications for mobile phones. Vlingo had both a successful consumer facing application, and also powered virtual assistants for hundreds of millions of phones, including worldwide support for the Samsung Galaxy S phones. Vlingo was acquired in 2012 and Mike and others from Vlingo formed Sense in 2013. Mike got his start as an electrical engineer undergrad at CMU before moving on to research roles in the early days of speech recognition at CMU and MIT.

ABSTRACT: From Impossible Research Projects to Creation of Industries In 1980, I was an undergrad at CMU and wandered into a professors office looking for a research project. That led to me joining a small group of people working on what seemed like an impossible problem: making computers which could understand human speech. In fact, it turns out it was an impossible problem at the time, but a lot has changed since then! A number of members of that small team have been instrumental in creating an industry around machine learning and conversation systems. Most of the successful speech recognition companies have been based on core teams with direct or indirect ties to CMU. I’ll discuss my path to starting multiple companies in the speech and natural language processing world and also how the core of what we built is now being used across multiple industries.

PIONEER LECTURE SERIES: ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE NO RECORDING ALLOWED

When & Where: April 26, 2018 Thursday / 6:30 - 7:50 PM / Rashid Auditorium, GHC Lecture 14/15