Biography
Steve Renals is professor of Speech Technology in the School of Informatics, at the University of Edinburgh. From 2003-2011, he was director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR), and from 2011-2015 he was director of the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation ( ILCC). He is currently director of Edinburgh's Institute for Data Science and Engineering (
He received a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1986, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1987, and a PhD in Speech Recognition and Neural Networks, also from Edinburgh, in 1990. From 1991-92 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, and was then an EPSRC postdoctoral fellow in Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge (1992-94). From 1994-2003 he was lecturer, then reader, in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, moving to Edinburgh in 2003.
He has about 250 publications in speech and language processing, and has led a number of large projects in the field, including the EPSRC Programme Grant Natural Speech Technology and several EU projects including SUMMA (Scalable Understanding of Multiligual Media) and the AMI and AMIDA Integrated Projects which were concerned with the recogniton and understanding of multi-party meetings. He is the director of CITIA (the Conversational Interaction Technologies Innovation Alliance, a European organisation concerned with bridging the gap between research and innovation for spoken languge technologies) and a fellow of the IEEE and of ISCA.