Alumni: Nikki Mirghafori

Senior Researcher, Speech
nikki @ icsi.berkeley.edu

Nikki Mirghafori received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with highest honors in 1991. After a year of research and development at the Digital Equipment Corporation working on advanced binary translation and compiler optimization, she went to graduate school at UC Berkeley, where she served as president of the Computer Science Graduate Student Association from 1996 to 1997. She received her doctorate in 1998 and, after a brief postdoctoral fellowship at ICSI, joined Nuance Communications working on speaker verification and speech recognition technology. In 2003, she took a position at ICSI as a senior researcher. In addition, she consults for Silicon Valley technology companies. She is a senior member of the IEEE and has served as an elected member of IEEE’s Speech and Language Technical Committee and Conference Board Committee, as well as referee for various journals and conferences. Her research interests include speech and speaker recognition, speech meta-data extraction, machine learning, statistical pattern recognition, and projects with humanistic relevance.

Visit Nikki Mirghafori's Web site.