Faculty Directory

Espy-Wilson, Carol

Espy-Wilson, Carol

Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Institute for Systems Research
2221 A.V. Williams Bldg.

Carol Espy-Wilson is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland. View or download Dr. Espy-Wilson's CV here.

Dr. Espy-Wilson received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.  She received her M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, Dr. Espy-Wilson was a faculty member at Boston University.

Dr. Espy-Wilson's research is in speech communication. She combines knowledge of digital signal processing, speech science, linguistics, acoustic phonetics and machine learning to conduct interdisciplinary research in speech and speaker recognition, speech production, speech enhancement and single-channel speech segregation.  She also analyzes speech as a behavioral signal for emotion recognition, sentiment analysis and the detection and monitoring of mental health.

Her company, OmniSpeech, translated research in her lab on noise suppression and speech enhancement to technology that improves speech-enabled technology in any device, app or platform.

Dr. Espy-Wilson has authored or coauthored numerous papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. She is a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ICSA) and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of IEEE. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard 2008–2009. Among the other honors and awards she has received for her research contributions are the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship in 1990, the Independent Scientist Award from the National Institutes of Health in 1998 and the Honda Initiation Award in 2003. She served as the chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the Acoustical Society of America (2007-2010) and as an Associate Editor of the ASA's magazine, Acoustics Today. She was a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation at the National Institutes of Health. Currently, she is a member of the Advisory Council for the NIH National Institutes on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. In 2019 she chaired the NSF Speech for Robotics Workshop.

Honors, awards and special recognition
  • Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (2021)
  • Editorial Board, Computer, Speech and Language (2021–)
  • Advisory Council, National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, NIH (2019-present)
  • University of Maryland Campus Woman of Influence (2020)
  • First African American woman, and first African American, in ECE to achieve tenure and be promoted to the rank of full professor (University of Maryland First to ADVANCE Program, 2019)
  • Jimmy Lin Award for Innovation (2018)
  • Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (2018)
  • Associate Editor, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
  • Advisory Council, NIH National Institutes on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (2015-2018) 
  • Institute for Systems Research Senior Faculty Fellow Award (2015-2017)  
  • Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award, University of Maryland (2012-2013)  
  • Advance Professor, University of Maryland (2011-2012)
  • Elected to the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE (2010-2012) 
  • Invention of the Year Award, University of Maryland (2010)
  • Maryland Innovator of the Year Award, Baltimore Daily Record (2010)  
  • Grand Prize, Rockville Economic Development Inc. (REDI) StartRight! Women’s Business Plan Competition, 2010
  • $50,000 SAIC-VentureAccelerator Competition, 2010
  • University of Maryland $75K Business Plan Competition (High Technology & Social Impact), 2010
  • Invention of the Year (Information Science): OmniSpeech, 2010
  • Chair, Speech Communication Technical Committee, Acoustical Society of America (2007-2010)
  • Editorial Board, Acoustics Today, Acoustical Society of America (2007-2009)
  • Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2008)
  • Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (2005) 
  • Honda Initiation Award (2003) 
  • Honda Initiation Award (2004)  
  • Member, NIH Language and Communication Study Section (2001-2004)
  • NIH Career Award (1998-2003)
  • Clare Boothe Luce Professor (1990-1995)  

  

 

 

Integration of engineering, linguistics, speech science and machine learning to study speech communication and develop robust speech technologies. Digital signal process, speech science, speech enhancement and segregation, noise robust automatic speech recognition, assistive technologies.


SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • ​C. Espy-Wilson, G. Sivaraman, M. Tiede, V. Mitra, E. Saltzmann, L. Goldstein, H. Nam (in press), “Modeling of Articulatory Gestures to Control Effects of Production Variability on Speech Technologies”. In Cangemi, Clayards, Niebuhr, Schupler & Zellers (eds). Rethinking Reduction, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2018.
  • Vikramjit Mitra, Ganesh Sivaraman, Hosung Nam, Carol Espy-Wilson, Elliot Saltzman, Mark Tiede, “Hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks For Articulatory And Acoustic Information Based Speech Recognition”, Speech Communication, Vol 89, Issue C, pp. 103-112, 2017.
  • V. Mitra, H. Nam, C. Espy-Wilson, E. Saltzman, and L. Goldstein, “Recognizing articulatory gestures from speech for robust speech recognition”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 131, no. 3, pp. 2270-2287, 2012.
  • X. Zhou, C. Espy-Wilson, S. Boyce, M. Tiede, Christy Holland and Ann Choe
  • “A magnetic resonance imaging-based articulatory and acoustic study of “retroflex” and “bunched” American English /r/ sounds”,  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 123, no. 6, pp. 4466-4481, 2008.
  • A. Juneja and Carol Espy-Wilson, “Probabilistic landmark detection for automatic speech recognition using acoustic-phonetic information”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 123, no. 2, pp. 1154-1168, 2008.
  • T. Pruthi,  C. Espy-Wilson and Brad Story, “Simulation and analysis of nasalized vowels based on MRI data”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 121,  no. 6, pp. 3858-3873, 2007.
  • O. Deshmukh, C. Espy-Wilson, L. Carney,  “Speech Enhancement using the Modified Phase Opponency Model”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 121,  no. 6, pp. 3886-3898, 2007
  • C. Y. Espy-Wilson, S. Boyce, M. Jackson, S. Narayanan and A. Alwan, “Acoustic Modeling of    American English /r/”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, pp. 343-356, 2000.
  • C. Y. Espy-Wilson, V. R. Chari, J. M. MacAuslan, C. B. Huang and M. J. Walsh “Enhancement of Electrolaryngeal Speech by Adaptive Filtering”, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, vol. 41, no. 6, December,  pp. 1253-1264, 1998
  • F. Guenther, C. Espy-Wilson, S. Boyce, M. Matthies, M. Zandipour and J. Perkell  “Articulatory tradeoffs reduce acoustic variability during American English /r/ production”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 105, no. 5, pp. 2854-2865, 1999
  • C. Y. Espy-Wilson (1994) “A Feature-Based Semivowel Recognition System,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 96, no. 1, pp. 65-72, 1992
  • C. Y. Espy-Wilson, “Acoustic Measures for Linguistic Features Distinguishing the Semivowels /wjrl/ in American English,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 92, no. 2, pp. 736-751, 1992.
     

Transforming Engineering: Highlighting Maryland Engineers

In celebration of Black History Month, we highlight the many impactful contributions of Black engineers in our community—students, alums, faculty, and staff—to the Clark School, our university, and world.

Maryland Engineers Awarded Grants to Address Humanity's Grand Challenges

Twelve projects led by or involving Maryland Engineering faculty have been awarded funding through the Grand Challenges Grants Program, the largest and most comprehensive program of its kind ever introduced at the University of Maryland.

Department Celebrates Achievements During Annual ‘Welcome Back’ Luncheon and Awards Ceremony

Event recognizes outstanding achievements by students, staff and faculty.

Espy-Wilson is PI for NSF project to improve 'speech inversion' tool

Machine learning will improve a tool that uses speech recordings to identify speech-related medical issues.

Professor Espy-Wilson Named IEEE Fellow

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

Frequent research collaborator Deanna Kelly named 'MPower Professor'

UMSOM Psychiatry professor has worked on mental health-related projects with Espy-Wilson, Ghodssi, Payne, among others.

Pamela Abshire is named UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher

She is one of six Clark School faculty honored at the university's annual convocation.

How tech can fill gaps in mental health care

$1.2M in NSF funding supports researchers’ work to connect patients, clinicians more effectively.

A new way to monitor mental health conditions

With machine learning, Carol Espy-Wilson is developing a phone app that can measure depression symptoms using speech and video cues.

  • Fellow, 2018

  • Fellow, 2005

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)


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