Professional Activities, Awards and Patents (selected)

  • 2015-: Member of the ACM Europe Council
  • 2016-: Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences
  • 2011-2013: listed (for 3 years in a row) among the “300 most influential personalities in Switzerland” by the Swiss economic journal “Bilan”.
  • Senior Member of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), since April 2009.
  • From 2002 to 2007: Member of the European Information Society Technology Advisory Group (ISTAG).
  • Recipient of a few prestigious entrepreneurship awards.
  • Fellow of the IEEE (“For contributions to the fields of statistical speech recognition and neural networks”), since January 2000.
  • International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Fellow “For contributions to research and leadership in the fields of statistical and neural network-based speech recognition”, August 2013
  • Fellow of the EPSRC College, EPSRC, UK
  • Expert for the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)
  • “One of the 20 Scientists Who Make Switzerland”: In the Issue No. 15, dated September 9, 2009, the Bilan magazine, one of the leading Swiss economic journals, nominated Hervé Bourlard as one of the 20 scientific research leaders "who make Switzerland".
  • March 2005: Belgian “Christoffel Plantin” Award, annually granted to a “Belgian citizen, living abroad and whose cultural, artistic or scientific activities contribute to ‘Belgian prestige’ in foreign countries”.
  • December 2004: Nominated “Entrepreneur of the Year” for Valais/Switzerland by the newspapers “Le Nouvelliste” and the “Walliser Bote”, as well as by the “Chambre Valaisanne de Commerce et de l’Industrie”.
  • 2002: Nominee of the Ernst and Young entrepreneurship award
  • International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley: Member of the ICSI Board of Trustees (since January 2002); ICSI External Fellow since 1991; ICSI invited guest scientist (1988-1989).
  • Member of the European Information Society Technology Advisory Group (ISTAG): from 2003 to 2007.
  • Fellow of the ESPRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Peer Review College, UK: since January 2003.
  • Editor-in-chief of “Speech Communication” (international journal about speech processing), Elsevier, North-Holland (from 1997 to 2001); now Associate Editor.
  • Associate Editor of the Intl. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, World Scientific (since 1998).
  • Editor of “Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces” (Springer)
  • Action Editor of “Neural Networks” (Pergamon), the official journal of the international Neural Network Society (from 1998 to 2002)
  • Editor of the “Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces”, Springer and OpenInterface Association.
  • Member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Neural Network Signal Processing (from 1998 to 2002)
  • IEEE Signal Processing Society Award for best Signal Processing Magazine paper (published in May 1995, award received in 1997).
  • Member of the Advisory Council of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association, since 1998)
  • Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, World Scientific.
  • Reviewer of a variety of publications (IEEE and others)
  • Appointed expert for the European Commission for European projects. From 2002 to 2007, member of the EC-ISTAG (Information Society Technology Advisory Group).
  • Guest Editor, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue on Biometric Signal Processing, 2004.
  • Guest Editor, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue on Robust Speech Recognition, 2005.
  • Member of the Organizing Committee or Scientific Committee of numerous international conferences on speech processing, neural networks, and/or multimodal processing, including:
      • Co-Technical Chairman of the 2002 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Orlando, FL, USA
      • General Chairman of the 2002 IEEE Workshop on Neural Networks Signal Processing (NNSP), Martigny, CH
      • Member of the Organizing Committee of the 2002 IEEE Intl. Conf on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Lausanne, August 2002
      • General Chairman of the 2003 Interspeech Conference, Geneva, CH
      • Co-General Chairman, IEEE Multi/Media Signal Processing (IEEE MMSP) workshop, Nice, 2001
      • European Liaison, and member of the scientific committee for the IEEE Neural Network for Signal Processing workshop, 2001
      • General Chairman of the First Joint Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI’04), Martigny (CH), June 21-23, 2004.
      • Member of the Organizing Committee of 2nd and 3rd Joint Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI’05-06), Edinburgh (July 11-13, 2006) and Washington (May 1-3, 2006).
      • General Chair of the 2011 Intl. Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI’2011), Alicante, November 14-18, 2011.
  • Technical Committee member of the IEEE-Thematic Meetings on Signal Processing (IEEE-THEMES) on “Signal and Information Processing for Social Networks”, during Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Dallas, March 15, 2009.
  • Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (J-STSP) on “Signal and Information Processing for Social Network”.
  • Guest Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on “A Mobile Revolution: The New Wave of Media Search”, Vol. 28, No. 4, July 2011.
  • Guest Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on “Signal and Information Processing for Social Learning and Networking”, 2012.
  • Guest Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on “Mobile Media Search”, 2012.
  • Guest Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on “Signal and Information Processing for Social Learning and Networking”, 2012.
  • 4th Workshop on “Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays” (HSCM’2014), Chairman of special session on “Advances in sparse modeling and low-rank modeling for speech processing”, Nancy, May 12-14, 2014.
  • Guest Editor of Speech Communication, Special Issue on “Advances in Sparse Modeling and Low-rank Modeling for Speech Processing, in preparation, 2015.
  • Initiator and coordinator of numerous EU projects, like Wernicke, SPRACH, AMI, AMIDA, inEvent, etc, for a total funding amount of above 100 M€.
  • This included scientific coordination of large EU Integrated Projects such as AMI (Augmented Multiparty Interaction), and AMIDA (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distant Access), which altogether received around $30M in funding from the European Commission (https://www.amiproject.org).
  • Over 12 years (2001-2013), Idiap has also operated a Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) on “Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2, www.im2.ch)” with around $40M of Swiss NSF funding (and $50M of matching funds). AMI/AMIDA focused on “meeting browsers”, while IM2 is centered on larger issues of human-to-human interaction and management of resulting multimedia recordings.
  • One of IM2's greatest impacts has been in commercialization of research, resulting in 17 new spin-off companies (http://www.im2.ch/tkt/Spin-off).
  • Patent:A Method, Apparatus and Computer Program for Determining the Location of a Plurality of Speech Sources, Patent application No. 2012US-13/654055, 2012