AI Awards for Professor Hynek Heřmanský

On Thursday, December 4, this year's AI Awards were presented. These are the only professional awards in the field of artificial intelligence in the Czech Republic. Professor Hynek Heřmanský, who has close ties to the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology and Brno University of Technology in general, received one of the six awards: specifically, for his long-term and extraordinary contribution to the development of speech recognition and machine processing. Without exaggeration, we can describe him as a personality who has contributed to shaping the current form of speech recognition and neural networks. Heřmanský's fundamental influence on the field is confirmed by a number of the highest international awards, including the ISCA Medal (2013), the IEEE Award (2020), and the status of IEEE Life Fellow.

Heřmanský's personal and professional journey is in itself an incredible story of what a Central European with a passion for modern technology has been able to achieve in recent decades. In 1972, he graduated in electrical engineering from the Brno University of Technology and, after various vicissitudes, managed to travel abroad and study for a doctorate at Tokyo University in Japan. In the 1980s, he was already working in industrial research in the United States. In the first half of the 1990s, he became a professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute in Portland, where many Czech (especially Brno) students came to study with him at the beginning of the millennium, for whom it was a turning point in their careers. This was also commented on by Professor Honza Černocký, who leads the "speech" research group at FIT and was also a member of the AI Awards expert jury: "Hynka's lifetime achievement award is also a recognition of the fact that at BUT we can do science at a decent level in this field, that we have talented people at the faculty, and that we have international projects and contacts."

At the end of 2008, Heřmanský accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University in the US and also became the head of the prestigious Center for Language and Speech Technologies (CLSP). He headed this center for 12 long years. His team at JHU included dozens of experts and students from around the world. He now spends most of the year in Brno. He works as a researcher in the Brno research group Speech@FIT, where he helps lead projects and mentor young scientists. We are grateful to him for this and much more.

More information about the award and the life of Hynek Heřmanský can be found in the press release.