Jan Sedivy

I'm

About

Human-like dialogue with artificial intelligence is still elusive. Why? Simple. We’re not there yet. Fifty years after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and forty years after Star Wars, the gap between that level of dialogue and “Alexa - play Spotify” is still a quantum leap. But voice and speech remain the most natural prerequisites for human communication.

My mission

After 18 years in the industry I have returned to the Czech Technical University, CIIRC to share my experience with students. My mission is:

  • Education: Create and deliver top curricula for Cloud Computing, Big Data, Analytics, Internet application development, Mobile, etc.
  • Research: Drive and work with students committed to innovation and science on new technologies in the field of Internet apps, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Analytics, Mobile, etc.
  • Entrepreneurship: Make a difference through, education, research, technology development, and dissemination of the results to industry. Create and cultivate an entrepreneurial environment to help new high-tech startups.

Employment, education

I am oscillating between entrepreneurship and academia throughout my professional life. Currently, I am wearing two heads. I am a professor at CTU and a co-founder of the Promethist.ai startup.

Professional Experience

Researcher

2010 - Present

Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University Prague

  • Director of the CTU MediLab Foundation,
  • Director of the NLP group

Technical Lead Manager

2008 - 2010

Google, Switzerland GmBH, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Managing regional teams in Google - Nordics, Central Europe
  • Managing the EMEA Internationalization team (ICU, phone numbers, audits ...)
  • Managing triaging Google products, testing, launching many different applications

Manager research, development, Voice Technologies and Systems

2000 - 2008

IBM Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic

  • Founded, built and led the IBM CZ research and development lab in Prague
  • Principal designer, responsible for the design, research and implementation of the core engine of the Embedded ViaVoice product (millions of licenses sold on the US market, Honda, NorthStar)
  • Project, package Coordinator in HomeTalk, CHIL, SAFIR projects in European Commission IST program, (2002 - 2007)
  • Managing the development of Multimodal Browser for embedded devices (2001 - 2003)

Research Staff Member (RSM), Human Language Technologies

1992 - 2000

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

  • Principal designer, researcher and developer of the IBM's ViaVoice for Embedded Multi-platform
  • Representing IBM in the AURORA project (ETSI, 1995-1998).
  • Part of the research group working on IBM ISSS and IBM Personal Dictation System. (Two IBM disclosures two patents).
  • Leading a team designing and implementing speech driven game for Disney World - EPCOT

Alexa Prize Competition

2021

Alquist soicial bot - The WINNER

2020

Alquist soicial bot - third place.

2018

Alquist soicial bot - second place.

2017

Alquist soicial bot - second place.

Educational experience

Assistant professor

1983 - 1992

Czech Technical University, Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering

Education

PhD - Digital Signal Processing

1978 - 1983

Czech Technical University, Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering

Master - Electrical Engineering

1972 - 1977

Czech Technical University, Prague, Faculty of Electrical EngineeringY

Startups

Promethist.ai

2019 - present

Promethist.ai - major products Flowstorm.ai and Talk To Poppy

Patents

Here is a list of patents. Mainly from the fields of Digital Signal Processing, Automatic Speech Recognition, and Internet.

  • US6073091 06/06/2000 Apparatus and Method for Forming a Filtered Inflected Language Model for Automatic Speech Recognition
  • US06023673 02/08/2000 Hierarchical labeler in a speech recognition system
  • US06016476 01/18/2000 Portable information and transaction processing system and method utilizing biometric authorization and digital certificate security
  • US05835888 11/10/1998 Statistical language model for inflected languages
  • US05544277 08/06/1996 Speech coding apparatus and method for generating acoustic feature vector component values by combining values of the same features for multiple time intervals
  • US05522011 05/28/1996 Speech coding apparatus and method using classification rules
  • US6438247 10/20/2002 Seatbelt Microphone Mounting
  • US6584425: 2003-06-24 / 2000-12-27 Smart thermometer
  • 20050086382 - 04/21/05 Systems and methods for providing dialog localization in a distributed environment and enabling conversational communication using generalized user gestures
  • 20050096070 - 05/05/05 Efficient communication with passive devices
  • 20050143972 - 06/30/05 System and methods for acoustic and language modeling for automatic speech recognition with large vocabularies
  • 6,965,773 B2 11/15/05 Virtual cooperative network formed by local clients in zones without cellular service
  • 7,100,000 8/29/2006 System and methods for processing audio using multiple speech technologies
  • 7,156,309 1/2/2007 Smart book
  • 7,315,613 1/1/2008 Multi-modal messaging
  • US Pat. application. 9837024 4/18/2001 Systems and methods for providing conversational computing via javaserver pages and javabeans
  • US Pat. Application 10007084 12/4/2001 Reusable VoiceXML dialog components, sub-dialogs and beans
  • US Pat. Application 11548976 - Filed Oct 12, 2006 Enhancement to Viterbi speech processing algorithm for hybrid speech models that conserves memory.
  • 6.442.519 2002 Speaker model adaptation via network of similar users

Awards

Here is a list of awards.

  • 2004 The Research Division Award for the development of the Embedded Engine
  • 2000 Outstanding Innovation Award for the development of the Embedded Engine
  • 2000 The Division award for the development of the Embedded Engine
  • 2000 Third Plateau Invention Achievement Award in appreciation and recognition of creative contribution to IBM progress.
  • 1999 Second Plateau Invention Achievement Award in appreciation and recognition of creative contribution to IBM progress.
  • 1998 Whatever it takes award for management of the speech recognition part of the network car, which IBM exhibited at COMDEX 97.
  • 1997 First Plateau Invention Achievement Award in appreciation and recognition of creative contribution to IBM progress.
  • 1996 an Outstanding Innovation Award in appreciation for the VoiceType 3.0 Design of an algorithm enabling to run CPU expensive labeling on a PC. The current product ViaVoice is still using these algorithms.
  • 1995 the Research Division Award for contribution to Large Vocabulary Isolated Speech Recognition

Contact

Location:

CIIRC CVUT 166 36 Praha 6, Dejvice, Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3

Call:

+420 224354181