Emmett J. Coin -- CEO and Industrial Poet

Emmett J. Coin is the Industrial Poet and technological founder of ejTalk. As Industrial Poet, he outlines the guiding principle for enduring designs: Spare, evocative, complete concepts that are compatible with multiple frames of reference, fashioned into reliable, scalable, industrial-strength solutions.

Emmett directs the R&D effort for human-computer conversation systems where he creates, explores and evangelizes methodologies that permit computers to carry on real-time intelligent and natural conversations with humans.

Emmett brings a broad technical background to bear on the problems of conversation. Emmett's expertise spans the history of human-computer speech. In the late 1960's he did graduate studies at MIT with Dennis Klatt, contributing to some of the very early work in computer-based speech recognition and speech synthesis. Prior to founding ejTalk he led the R&D efforts in natural language systems at Intellivoice Communications for four years.

Throughout his career he has focused on sophisticated information/interface issues. With Physiologic, Inc., his first modestly successful venture, his company provided solutions to research hospitals and groups who needed novel ways to collect and analyze real-time human physiologic data.

As an advisor to Chrysler Corporation's Technical Computer Center (1984 - 1990), he designed and supervised the marriage of Chrysler's 20-year old 3D CAD system (originally punched-card based) with its 10-year old 2D CAD system (mainframe-terminal based) into a state-of-the-art, workstation-based CAD system that offered experienced users their well-known command version as well as a completely visual version with animated on-line help.

Currently, Emmett is focused on conversational engines and their respective conversation development tools, specifically how the industry can use the full power of object-oriented design for the distinct and separate linguistic and computational components.

Publications

• “Speech is NOT Dialog” Speech Technology Magazine, May/June 2002
• “Managing Conversation: Bringing a Human Touch to Speech Technology” CTI Magazine, July 1998
• “A Real-Time Calculator-Plotter for the Log of Mean Expired Nitrogen” presented at the 58th Annual FASEB Meeting.

Presentations

• “The Allure and Power of Talking with the Machine” DCI-CRM Conference, Chicago, Ill February 14, 2001
• “A Fundamental Architecture to Integrate Conversation Management Engines with Conversation Development and Evaluation Tools” Third Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation, HCCW, Bellagio, Italy July 2000
• “Distributed Speech Recognition: Accuracy for the Year 2000 and Beyond” Telephony Voice User Interface Conference, TMA Associates (coordinated by Dr. William Meisel), Scottsdale, AZ, January 28, 1999
• “A Client-Server Relationship Between the AXE-10 Switch and the Subscriber Terminal Device for Enhanced Recognition Accuracy”, Ericsson ESS Speech Recognition Seminar, Breda, Netherlands, September 17, 1998
• “Conversation Analysis Tools” Second Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation, Bellagio, Italy July 1998
• “Embedding Speech Recognition into Wireless Networks” Sixth Annual Wireless Symposium and Exhibition, Santa Clara, CA, February 9 – 13, 1998
• “The Reality of Conversational Interfaces” Advanced Speech Applications and Technologies, ASAT Conference: The Telephony User Interface: Designing Applications for Success, San Francisco, CA, April 15, 1997

Meetings Regularly Attended

• Automated Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) Workshops
• IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
• Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• SIGdial
• Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS)
• SpeechTEK
• Internet Telecom

Panels

• Panelist for Michigan Object-Oriented Technology User Group (MOTUG). Focusing on real-world experiences implementing object-oriented technologies and methodologies.
• Panelist for the cable television program “Say What.”

Affiliations (present and past)

• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• VoiceXML Org
• Computer Society
• Signal Processing Society
• Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging
• Association forComputational Linguistics (ACL)
• SIGdial - Dialog Group
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Transactions on Graphics
• Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
• Planetary Society

Technical Interests

• AI, OO Methodologies, Visualization, Simulation, VR