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Professor of ComputerScience at Carnegie Mellon University and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Alexander Waibel is Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). He is director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies.
Waibel is known for his work on AI, Machine Learning, Multimodal Interfaces and Speech Translation Systems. He proposed early Neural Network based Speech and Language systems, including in 1987 the TDNN, the first shift-invariant (“Convolutional”) Neural Network, and early Neural Speech and Language systems. Based on advances in ML, he and his team developed early (’93-’98) multimodal interfaces including the first emotion recognizer, face tracker, lipreader, error repair system, a meeting browser, support for smart rooms and human-robot collaboration.
He pioneered many cross-lingual communication systems that now overcome language barriers via speech and image interpretation: first consecutive (1992) and simultaneous (2005) speech translation systems, road sign translator, heads-up display translation goggles, face/lip and EMG translators.
Waibel founded & co-founded more than 10 companies and various non-profit services to transition results from academic work to practical deployment. This included “Jibbigo LLC” (2009), the first speech translator on a phone (acquired by Facebook 2013), “M*Modal” medical transcription and reporting (acquired by Medquist and 3M), “Kites” interpreting services for subtitling and video conferencing (acquired by Zoom in 2021), “Lecture Translator”, the first automatic simultaneous translation service (2012) at Universities and European Parliament, and STS services for medical missions/disaster relief.
Waibel published >1000 articles, books, and patents (>43,000 citations, h-index 99, i10-index >500). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Germany, member of the research group of AI of the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat), a Life-Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of ISCA, and a Research Fellow of Zoom. Waibel was elected to a 12-member panel of AI pioneers to advise the Vatican on a global appeal for AI in the “Global Fraternity”, presented to Pope Leo XIV in September 2025.
Waibel received numerous awards for his work, including the IEEE Flanagan award, the ICMI sustained achievement award, the Meta prize, the A. Zampolli award, and the Alcatel-SEL award.
He received his BS from MIT, and MS and PhD degrees from CMU.
Photo: Markus Breig/KIT
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