The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elevated three Carnegie Mellon University professors affiliated with the School of Computer Science to the rank of fellow. Yuejie Chi, Florian Metze and Shinji Watanabe join a list of select IEEE members who have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in one of the organization's fields of interest.

Chi, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department with an affiliation in the Machine Learning Department, earned the rank of fellow for her work on statistical signal processing with low-dimensional structures. Her work focuses on the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of data science and machine learning, and is motivated by the challenge of extracting useful information and making reliable decisions from large-scale and high-dimensional data in resource-starved environments.

IEEE elevated Metze to fellow for his contributions to end-to-end training of speech recognition systems. The associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) works in the broad field of automatic speech recognition and audio-visual content understanding — what he says is "in speech that's not in text." His background covers speech and audio processing, processing of medical conversations (with Pittsburgh startup Abridge.com), analysis of voice properties, and multilingual or low-resource speech recognition. Metze is currently on leave to contribute to research efforts at Meta AI.

Watanabe, an associate professor in the LTI, earned the fellow designation for his contributions to speech recognition technology. His research interests include automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, spoken language understanding, and machine learning for speech and language processing.

IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization, and the total number of fellows selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one percent of its total voting membership. View a complete list of the class of 2023 on the IEEE website.