Dr. Carol Espy-Wilson among UMd's top teachers
She has been honored as a 2010 Maryland Innovator of the Year, for "Multi-Pitch Tracking in Adverse Environments," her invention that radically improves sound quality over cell phones and in hearing aids, among other devices.
Previous technologies work by taking in all of a sound and then attempting to filter out anything that is not speech. Espy-Wilson's innovation is a technology that, she says, "pulls the speech out of the noise" by focusing on the characteristics that make speech unique. "We don't focus on the noise at all," she explains. "We focus on the speech."
Dr. Espy-Wilson is also the recipient of the University of Maryland's 2012-2013 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher award. She is one of six professors to receive this award. She is also the receipient of the NSF Minority Initiation Award (1990-1992), the Clare Booth Luce Professorship (1990-1995) the NIH Independent Scientist Award (1998-2003), the Honda Initiation Award (2004-2005), and a Radcliffe Fellowship (2008).
She is again among the 13th annual 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology. Selectees gather Jan. 15 in the nation's capital for Innovation & Equity 2013: Keeping America First in Technology: Public Innovation & Supplier Diversity.
The innovator received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1979. She received her M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1981, 1984 and 1987, respectively. She was on faculty at Boston University from 1990 to 2001 and is Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She directs the Speech Communication Lab at UMD.
Dr. Espy-Wilson is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of IEEE. She served as Chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the ASA from 2007 to 2010, as an associate editor of the ASA's magazine, Acoustics Today, and as an appointed member of the Language and Communication Study Section at NIH, 2001-2004. Currently, she is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, an elected member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE and a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation Research at NIH.
Espy-Wilson founded Omnispeech LLC in 2009 to bring the technology to market. She is chief technology officer.
