Prof. Dr. Hervé BOURLARD

Photo Hervé Bourlard

Hervé Bourlard is Director of the Idiap Research Institute, a not-for-profit research institute, affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL) and University of Geneva, involved in speech and speaker recognition, computer vision, machine learning, and multimodal interfaces. H. Bourlard is also Professor at EPFL, Founding Director of a National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) on “Interactive Multimodal Information Management” (IM2) and an External Fellow of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley (CA).

His current interests mainly include statistical pattern classification, signal processing, multi-channel processing, artificial neural networks, and applied mathematics, with applications to a wide range of Information and Communication Technologies, including spoken language processing, speech and speaker recognition, language modelling, multimodal interaction, augmented multi-party interaction, and distant group collaborative environments.

H. Bourlard is the author/co-author of over 330 reviewed papers (including one IEEE best paper award) and book chapters, three books, and five edited books. He is a Fellow of the IEEE “for contributions in the fields of statistical speech recognition and neural networks” and a Fellow of International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) “for his fundamental contributions to research and leadership in the fields of statistical and neural network-based speech recognition.” He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Intl. Computer Science Institute (Berkeley, CA), a member of the Advisory Council of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association), ex-member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Neural Networks Signal Processing, and an appointed expert for the European Commission (and ex-member of the EU Information Society Technology Advisory Group-ISTAG).

He is (or has been) a member of the program/scientific committees of numerous international conferences (e.g., General Chairman of IEEE Workshop on Neural Networks for Signal Processing 2002, Co-Technical Chairman of IEEE ICASSP 2002, General Chairman of Interspeech 2003) and on the Editorial Board of several journals (e.g., past co-Editor-in-Chief of “Speech Communication”). H. Bourlard is, or has been, a member of the program and/or scientific committee of numerous international conferences, including co-Technical Chairman of the IEEE-ICASSP’02, General Chairman of IEEE-NNSP’02 and Interspeech’03. He is also member of the Editorial Board of several journals, including “Speech Communication” (ex-Editor-in-Chief), “Intl. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, and “Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces” (Springer). He was also the Guest Editor of several Special Issues, including Biometric Signal Processing of the Eurasip Journal on Applied Signal Processing (April 2004); IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on “Mobile Media Search” (2012); IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on “Signal and Information Processing for Social Learning and Networking” (2012).

Having worked for academia as well as large and small industries, Hervé Bourlard has broad and deep experience in both the industrial and academic worlds. He has initiated and managed many national and international projects (with US, EU and CH public funding agencies, as well as industry). Among recent EU projects, he initiated and coordinated large Integrated Projects like AMI (Augmented Multiparty Interaction), AMIDA (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distance Access), or STREPs like inEvent (Accessing Dynamic Networked Multimedia Event). He also initiated several start-up companies, and is the recipient of a few prestigious entrepreneurship awards.

Hervé Bourlard is also a Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, and an elected member of the ACM Europe Council.

Scientific Records & Indicators (as of 15 November 2016)

  • Peer reviewed publications (all available on request, many of them available through publications.idiap.ch or infoscience.epfl.ch:
    • 9 books (author, co-author, or editor)
    • 29 book chapters
    • 60 refereed journal papers
    • 250+ refereed conference papers
  • GoogleScholar indicators
    • H-index: 57
    • Number of citations: 12’816


Idiap Research Institute, Director
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Professor
P.O. Box 592
Rue Marconi, 19
CH-1920 Martigny, Switzerland
Tel: +41-27-721.77.11
Fax: +41-27-721.77.12
Web: www.idiap.ch/~bourlard
Email: bourlard [at] idiap.ch