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RLE Professor Ken Stevens awarded National
Medal of Science
Engineer recognized for work in
speech science
Cambridge, MA 01.2000
by Deborah Halber, MIT
News Office
Economist Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus,
and Kenneth N. Stevens, Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical
Engineering, are among this year's recipients of the National
Medal of Science. President Clinton today named 12 of the
nation's most respected researchers, three of them Nobel Prize
winners, to receive the 1999 awards.
Nobel laureate Solow will receive his science medal in economics.
Prof. Stevens will receive a medal in engineering for his
research in speech sciences that laid the groundwork for many
of today's speech synthesis and recognition technologies.
"It was a surprise, partly because I'm in a field that
normally doesn't receive that kind of recognition," Prof.
Stevens said. "It was gratifying for the field, in a
sense, and meaningful in terms of my career and in terms of
great colleagues and students I've had here."
"MIT has been a great place to work in this field. I've
brought together engineers with scientists in linguistics
and psychology because speech covers quite a wide area."
A Diverse Group
Honoring the discoveries and lifetime achievements of the
nation's top scientists, the Medal of Science recipients are
a diverse group that: created new scientific fields such as
conservation biology and speech sciences and led to discoveries
that determined why the ozone "hole" exists, among
other things.
"The contributions of these scientists are so profound,
so connected to our everyday lives and so lasting that these
medals go only a short way to express the gratitude the nation
owes them," said Rita Colwell, director of the National
Science Foundation (NSF).
The new medalists will receive their medals along with five
awardees of the National Medal of Technology, which were also
announced today, on March 14 at the White House.
David Baltimore, former faculty member at MIT, president
of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is one
of three new medalists to have won the Nobel Prize. Baltimore
made a key discovery of a protein carried in cancer-inducing
viruses that reverses the ordinary flow of information in
biological systems, leading to further discoveries of cancer-causing
genes. Baltimore's discovery was made simultaneously with
Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin, for which they
shared the 1975 Nobel Prize.
Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize for demonstrating the critical
importance of technological advances on economic growth.
The other recipients include chemist Stuart A. Rice and physicists
James W. Cronin and Leo P. Kadanoff from the University of
Chicago. Nobelist Baltimore, along with Jared Diamond, physiology
professor at UCLA School of Medicine, and Lynn Margulis, a
University of Massachusetts distinguished professor will receive
Medals of Science for their work in the biological sciences.
In addition to Chicago's Rice, chemistry medals will go to
John Ross, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University
and Susan Solomon a senior scientist at the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colo.
Felix E. Browder of Rutgers University and Ronald R. Coifman
at Yale University were named to receive Medals of Science
for mathematics.
Congress established the Medal of Science in 1959, which
NSF administers. Counting today's recipients, there have been
374 medals bestowed on leading U.S. scientists and engineers.
Professor Stevens' Background
How people move the tongue, lips, and other articulators fast
enough to accomplish speech is one of the classical puzzles
of speech science. Kenneth N. Stevens has shown that many
of the distinctions between speech sounds utilize special
non-linear relations between articulation and acoustic output
that enable speakers to produce correct sounds without having
to hit all of the individual articulator targets with particular
accuracy. In this way, he has unraveled an important part
of the mystery that shrouds our ability to produce and understand
speech.
Dr. Stevens, who received the Sc.D. in electrical engineering
from MIT and bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering
physics from the University of Toronto, has pioneered contributions
to the theory, mathematical methods and analysis of acoustics
in speech production, leading to the contemporary foundations
of speech science.
Stevens' theoretical work on acoustic properties of speech
sounds that comprise the linguistic elements of language has
led to the contemporary foundations of speech science. His
theoretical work on acoustic invariance has defined unifying
principles that have integrated major portions of acoustic
phonetics, phonology, speech science and linguistics.
Many of the leading speech scientists throughout the world
have been Prof. Stevens' students or post-doctoral fellows,
or have sought out sabbaticals in his laboratory. Stevens'
laboratory has been referred to by colleagues as a "national
treasure."
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