Biography †

Heiga Zen was born in Osaka, Japan on March 4th, 1979. He received the A.E. degree in electronic and information engineering from Suzuka National College of Technology, Suzuka, Japan, in 1999, and the B.E., M.E., and Dr.Eng. degrees in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science and engineering from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan, in 2001, 2003, and 2006, respectively.

From April 2003 to March 2004, he was an Intern Researcher (part time) at ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories (ATR-SLT), Kyoto, Japan. From June 2004 to May 2005, he was an Intern/Co-op Researcher (full time) in the Human Language Technology group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA. From April 2006 to July 2008, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Nagoya Institute of Technology. From July 2008 to July 2011, he was a Research Engineer at Speech Technology Group, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. Cambridge Research Laboratory, Cambridge, UK. From July 2011 to November 2018, he was with Google, London, UK. Presently, he is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include statistical speech recognition and synthesis.

Dr. Zen received the Awaya Award in 2006 and the Itakura Award in 2008 both from the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ). He won the TELECOM System Technology Prize from the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation (TAF) of Japan in 2008, the Information and Systems Society Best Paper Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) of Japan in 2008, the Yamashita SIG Research Award from Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) in 2009, and IPSJ Kiyasu Special Industrial Achievement Award, 2012. He is a member of IEEE and ISCA, and was a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) from 2012 to 2014. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing from 2017.

Educations †

• April 2003 - March 2006
  Nagoya Institute of Technology Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
• April 2001 - March 2003
  Nagoya Institute of Technology Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• April 1999 - March 2001
  Nagoya Institute of Technology Dept. of Computer Science
• April 1994 - March 1999
  Suzuka National College of Technology Dept. of Electronic and Information Engineering

Professional Experiences †

• November 2018 - Present
  Google Japan LLC., Brain team, Senior Staff Research Scientist
• July 2011 - November 2018
  Google UK Ltd., Speech team, Research Scientist (2011--2013), Senior Research Scientist (2013--2015), Staff Research Scientist (2015--2017), Senior Staff Research Scientist (2017--).
• July 2008 - July 2011
  Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. Cambridge Research Laboratory, Research Engineer
• April 2008 - July 2008
  EC FP7 EMIME Project, Postdoctoral Research Associate
• April 2006 - March 2008
  MEXT e-Society Project, Postdoctoral Research Associate
• June 2004 - May 2005
  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Intern/Co-op Researcher
• April 2003 - March 2004
  ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories, Intern Researcher
• October 2002 - November 2002
  ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories, Intern Student

Awards †

• June 2013
  Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), Kiyasu Special Industrial Achievement Award
• September 2010
  Best paper invited to Speech Communication, Interspeech2010, 2010
• March 2009
  Information Processing Society Japan, Yamashita SIG Research Award
• December 2008
  Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Information and Systems Society Best Paper Award
• March 2008
  The Acoustical Society of Japan, The Itakura Prize Innovative Young Researcher Award
• March 2008
  Telecommunications Advancement Foundation, Telecom System Technology Award
• September 2007
  2007 Spring Meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan, Best Poster Award (co-author, first author is Kazuhiro Nakamura)
• March 2006
  The Acoustical Society of Japan, The Awaya Prize Young Researcher Award
• April 1998
  Suzuka National College of Technology, Special Student Award
• March 1998
  English Technical Writing Test, Minister of Education Promotional Award

Grants †

• April 2007 - March 2008
  Hori Information Science Promotion Foundation
• April 2006 - March 2008
  Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Grant No. 18800019

Society works †

• September 2018
  ISCA Interspeech 2018, Lead Area Chair (Speech Synthesis)
• September 2016
  ISCA Interspeech 2016, Area Chair (Speech Synthesis)
• September 2016
  9th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Program Committee Member
• December 2015
  IEEE ASRU 2015, Invited Speaker
• September 2015
  ISCA Interspeech 2015, Area Chair (Speech Synthesis)
• August 2013
  8th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Program Committee Member & Keynote Speaker
• November 2010
  FALA 2010, Keynote Speaker
• September 2010
  7th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Program Committee Member & Session Chair
• September 2009
  ISCA Interspeech 2009, Area Coordinator (Speech Synthesis)
• March 2008
  ASJ Spring Meeting, Session Sub-Chair (Adaptation & Transformation)
• September 2007
  ASJ Autumn Meeting, Session Sub-Chair (Speech Synthesis)
• August 2007
  6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Session Chair (Evaluations)
• March 2007
  ASJ Spring Meeting, Session Sub-Chair (Acoustic Modeling)
• Reviewer of conferences/journals
  ICASSP, Interspeech, ASRU, ISCA SSW, IEICE, ASJ, Neural Computation, Speech Communication, Computer Speech & Language, IEEE Trans. ASLP

Publication list †

Publication list is also available at Google Scholar Citations