Lawrence Rabiner is an Electrical Engineer who has worked in the fields of digital signal processing and speech processing for his entire career. Lawrence Rabiner’s specialty has been digital signal processing for automatic speech recognition and he has worked on and built a number of innovative systems for AT&T for speech recognition in the network.
Lawrence Rabiner is married (for more than 43 years) with three daughters. His wife Suzanne was a teacher in the Bayonne NJ school system. She retired in June 2002. His oldest daughter, Sheri Gordon, is a lawyer. His middle daughter, Wendi Heinzelman, is a professor of ECE and the Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Rochester, working in the field of wireless and sensor networks. His youngest daughter, Joni Rabiner, is a second year medical pediatric emergency room Fellow working at the Montifiore Hospital in the Bronx. He has five grandchildren, Tess, 9 years old, Nate, 8 years old, Max, 6 years old, Molly, 4 years old and Chloe, 3 years old.
Lawrence Rabiner has a joint academic appointment between Rutgers University (9 months each year) and the University of California at Santa Barbara where he teaches for 3 months each year.

Lawrence Rabiner was born in 1943 in Brooklyn, New York. He received the BS degree and the MS in EE simultaneously in 1964, and the Ph.D. in 1967, all from MIT. He was a "co-op" atBell Labs at Whippany and Murray Hill, N.J. between 1962 and 1964, where he worked on digital circuitry, military communications, and the study of binaural hearing. He subsequently became a regular staff member of the Laboratories. His Ph.D. thesis and some of his early work at Bell Laboratories was in the field of speech synthesis and since 1967 he has worked on digital filter design, spectrum analysis, implementation of digital systems, random number generators, and other aspects of signal processing. He is currently Speech and Image Processing Services Research Vice President at AT&T Laboratories. He has co-authored four major books in the signal processing field,Theory and Application of Digital Signal Processing (1975), Digital Processing of Speech Signals (1978),Multirate Digital Signal Processing (1983), and Fundamentals of Speech Recognition (1993). He has written or co-authored over 300 articles, including many on speech recognition and speech synthesis, and has been the recipient of 25 patents. He received the IEEE's Group on Audio and Electroacoustics' Paper Award (1971), the Achievement Award (1978); the Emanuel R. Piore Award (1980), the ASSP Society Award (1980); the Centennial Medal, and the SPS Magazine Award, (1994). He is a fellow of the IEEE (1976) [fellow award for "leadership and contributions to VLSI technologies"] and the Acoustical Society of America, served as editor of theASSP Transactions, and is a former member of the IEEE Proceedings editorial board. He has also been active in theSignal Processing Society and its predecessors, acting as its vice president (1973), and president, (1974-75).

Education
Ph.D. - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967
M.S. - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964
B.S. - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964

Research Interests
Digital Signal Processing
Digital Signal Processing
Speech Recognition
Speech Analysis
Speaker Recognition
Multimedia

Awards and Recognitions

Recent Journal Articles

         
            Lawrence Rabiner was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 28, 1943. He received the S.B., and S.M. degrees simultaneously in June 1964, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in June 1967, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts.

            From 1962 through 1964, Dr. Rabiner participated in the cooperative program in Electrical Engineering at  AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany and Murray Hill, New Jersey. During this period Dr. Rabiner worked on designing digital circuitry, issues in military communications problems, and problems in binaural hearing. Dr. Rabiner joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1967 as a Member of the Technical Staff. He was promoted to Supervisor in 1972, Department Head in 1985, Director in 1990, and Functional Vice President in 1995. He joined the newly created AT&T Labs in 1996 as Director of the Speech and Image Processing Services Research Lab, and was promoted to Vice President of Research in 1998 where he managed a broad research program in communications, computing, and information sciences technologies.
Dr. Rabiner retired from AT&T at the end of March 2002.
                Dr. Rabiner has pioneered a range of novel algorithms for digital filtering and digital spectrum analysis.The most well known of these algorithms are the Chirp z-Transform method (CZT) of spectral analysis, a range of optimal FIR (finite impulse response) digital filter design methods based on linear programming
and Chebyshev approximation methods, and a class of decimation/interpolation methods for digital sampling rate conversion. In the area of speech processing, Dr. Rabiner has made contributions to the fields of speech synthesis and speech recognition. Dr. Rabiner built one of the first digital speech synthesizers that was able to convert arbitrary text to intelligible speech. In the area of speech recognition, Dr. Rabiner was a major contributor to the creation of the statistical method of representing speech that is known as hidden Markov modeling (HMM). Dr. Rabiner was the first to publish the scaling algorithm for the Forward-Backward method of training of HMM recognizers. His research showed how to successfully implement an HMM system based on either discrete or continuous density parameter distributions. The ultimate payoff of Dr. Rabiner’s research was a series of speech recognition systems that went into deployment by AT&T to enable automation of a range of ‘operator services’ that previously had been carried out using live operators. One such system, called the Voice Recognition Call Processing (VRCP) system, automated a small vocabulary recognition system (5 active words) with word spotting and barge-in capability, and was able to achieve extremely high performance and reliability. It resulted in savings of
several hundred millions of dollars annually for AT&T.
                 Dr. Rabiner is co-author of the books “Theory and Application of Digital Signal Processing” (Prentice-Hall, 1975), “Digital Processing of Speech Signals” (Prentice-Hall, 1978), “Multirate Digital Signal Processing” (Prentice-Hall, 1983), and “Fundamentals of Speech Recognition” (Prentice-Hall, 1993).Dr. Rabiner is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, the National Academy of Engineering,the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, BellLaboratories, and AT&T. He is a former President of the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society, a former Vice-President of the Acoustical Society of America, a former editor of the ASSPTransactions, and a former member of the IEEE Proceedings Editorial Board.