ProfessorJulie Carson-Berndsen

Julie Carson-Berndsen retired from the position of Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and Speech Technology at the UCD School of Computer Science in October 2024. Over the past 30 years, Prof. Carson-Berndsen’s research has addressed a range of topics that lie at the intersection of computational linguistics and speech technology, focussing on techniques for learning, representing and evaluating fine-grained linguistic information for speech recognition and synthesis. This included the use of machine learning techniques to develop models that captured those phonetic similarities and phonological constraints which were important for analysing and generating expressive human speech. Her most recent research focussed on exploring transformer-based speech recognition models for phonetic and phonological explainability. Prof. Carson-Berndsen has been a Principal Investigator at the ADAPT Research Centre (www.adaptcentre.ie), where she served 6 years as the UCD representative on the ADAPT Management Committee and 4 years on the Digital Content Transformation Strand leadership team. Prof. Carson-Berndsen was General Co-Chair of the 24th INTERSPEECH Conference which was held in Dublin in August 2023 (https://interspeech2023.org). Prof. Carson-Berndsen has provided senior leadership in graduate education at UCD and at a national level as Dean of Graduate Studies and Deputy Registrar. She was also co-founder of the Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Digitally Enhanced Reality (www.d-real.ie) and UCD lead for the first 4 years of the centre.