Carol Espy-Wilson

Carol Yvonne Espy-Wilson is a prominent electrical engineer and academic known for her significant contributions to speech communication technology. She serves as the Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OmniSpeech, LLC, a company dedicated to enhancing voice clarity in noisy environments through advanced speech processing technologies.

Early Life and Education

Born around 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia, Espy-Wilson was the youngest of four children. She pursued her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1979. She continued her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she obtained both a Master's (1981) and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1987). Her doctoral research focused on an acoustic-phonetic approach to speech recognition.14

Academic Career

Espy-Wilson is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she has been teaching since 2001. She previously held positions at Boston University and has been involved in various research initiatives related to speech communication, including directing the Speech Communication Lab at UMD. Notably, she is recognized as the first African American woman to achieve tenure and be promoted to full professor in her department.46

Professional Achievements

In addition to her academic roles, Espy-Wilson founded OmniSpeech in 2011. The company specializes in noise suppression technologies that improve voice intelligibility across various platforms, including mobile devices and hearing aids. Their flagship technology, OmniClear, is designed for low-latency processing and operates efficiently even on devices with limited computational power.235

Espy-Wilson's work has garnered multiple awards, including her recognition as an IEEE Fellow in 2022 for her contributions to speech enhancement and recognition technologies.4 She has also participated in prestigious fellowships, such as the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University from 2008 to 2009.14

Research Interests

Her research interests encompass a wide range of topics within speech communication, including:

• Speech production and recognition
• Speaker recognition
• Speech enhancement
• Audio content analysis

Espy-Wilson's innovative approach integrates engineering principles with linguistics to address variability in speech signals, aiming to develop more effective speech technologies.46

Through her leadership at OmniSpeech and her academic contributions, Carol Espy-Wilson continues to influence the fields of electrical engineering and speech communication significantly.