Nancy F. Chen received her Ph.D. from MIT and Harvard in 2011. She worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on her Ph.D. research in multilingual speech processing. She is currently leading research efforts in conversational AI and natural language generation with applications related to education, healthcare and journalism at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR. Dr. Chen led a cross-continent team for low-resource spoken language processing, which was one of the top performers in the NIST Open Keyword Search Evaluations (2013-2016), funded by the IARPA Babel program.
Dr. Chen has received numerous awards, including the 2019 L’Oréal Singapore For Women in Science National Fellowship, Best Paper at APSIPA ASC (2016), the Singapore MOE (Ministry of Education) Outstanding Mentor Award (2012), the Microsoft-sponsored IEEE Spoken Language Processing Grant (2011), and the NIH (National Institute of Health) Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Award (2004-2008).
Dr. Chen is a senior IEEE member, an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2016-2018, 2019-2021), associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2020-2023), Neurocomputing (2020), and IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2019-2021) and the guest editor for the special issue of “End-to-End Speech and Language Processing” in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2017).
In addition to her academic endeavors, Dr. Chen has also consulted for various companies ranging from startups to multinational corporations in the areas of emotional intelligence (Cogito Health), speech recognition (Vlingo, acquired by Nuance), and defense and aerospace (BAE Systems).