Prof. Ami Moyal

Prof. Ami Moyal

President

Academic Background

Prof. Ami Moyal was appointed President of Afeka Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering in 2014. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is an expert in automatic speech recognition. Prior to his election, he founded and led the Afeka Center for Language Processing and headed of the School of Electrical Engineering.

As President of Afeka

As President of Afeka, Prof. Moyal is carrying out his vision to transform engineering education and ensure the workforce readiness of Afeka graduates by modifying curricula, encouraging innovative pedagogy, integrating extra-curricular activities, restructuring learning and working spaces and building collaborations with the industry and the education system – all for the purpose of equipping students with the vital skills and knowledge required by modern engineers, while at the same time creating an atmosphere that promotes excellence through joy of learning.

Industry Roles 

Prior to joining Afeka Prof. Ami Moyal spent 15 years in the Israeli hi-tech Industry at NSC, Natural Speech Communication Ltd, a speech recognition product developer (hardware and software) for speech driven services in the telephony, call center and security markets. He began his career at NSC as a Research Scientist after which he became Director of the company's Algorithms Group, then Vice President of Technology, Vice President of Business Development and finally CEO.

Research Grants

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with Nice System Ltd., Security Division; “Hybrid Approach for Keyword Spotting of Continuous Speech" (2nd year); 2/2015 – 1/2016.

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research; "Speech Driven HMI in Domain-Specific Dialogue" (5th year); 8/2014 – 7/2015.

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with Nice System Ltd., Call Center Division; “Robust Speaker Diarization for Multi-Speakers Telephony" (2nd year); 7/2014 – 6/2015.

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with Nice System Ltd., Security Division; “Hybrid Approach for Keyword Spotting of Continuous Speech" (1st Year); 2/2014 – 1/2015.

Project with a High-tech Company; “Language Recognition of short Textual Messages”; 9/2013 – 2/2014.

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research; "Speech Driven HMI in Domain-Specific Dialogue" (4th year); 8/2013 – 7/2014.

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research Project; “Keyword Spotting out of Continuous Speech”; 11/2013 – 5/2014.

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research Project; “Speaker Diarization”; 10/2013 – 8/2014.

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with Nice System Ltd., Call Center Division; “Robust Speaker Diarization for Multi-Speakers Telephony" (1st year); 7/2013 – 6/2014.

Project with a High-tech Company; “Sematic Search”; 2/2014 – 3/2014

Project with a High-tech Company; “Phonetic Search Keyword Spotting out of Spontaneous Speech”; 2/2013 – 10/2013

Project with a High-tech Company; “Text and Language Independent Speaker Verification”; 2/2013 – 10/2013

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with Nice System Ltd., Security Division; “Phonetic Search Based on Cross-Language Phoneme Transformation" (2nd year); 9/2012 – 8/2013

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research Project; “Spoken Term Detection Evaluation” – NIST Open Keyword Search 2013 Evaluation (OpenKWS13); 4/2013 – 7/2013

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research; "Speech Driven HMI in Domain-Specific Dialogue" (3rd year); 8/2012 – 7/2013

Project with a European high-tech Company; "Speech Recognition for the Search Market"; 8/2011 – 4/2013

Project with a High-tech Company; “Embedded Speech Recognition for Mobile Devices”; 2012 – 2013

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with Nice System Ltd., Security Division; “Phonetic Search Based on Cross-Language Phoneme Transformation" (1st year); 9/2011 – 8/2012

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research; "Speech Driven HMI in Domain-Specific Dialogue" (2nd year); 8/2011 – 7/2012

Maf'at (Israeli MOD) Funded Research; "Speech Driven HMI in Domain-Specific Dialogue" (1st year); 2011 – 2012

Project with a High-tech Company; “The Use of NLP to Improve Speech Recognition Results”; 2012

Project with Athena Security Implementations Ltd.; "Keyword Spotting Application in Several Languages"; 2011

Project with VocalZoom Ltd.; "Improving Speech Recognition Performance in Noisy Conditions Using a Laser Microphone"; 2011

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with SpeechModules Ltd.; “An Efficient Algorithm for Voicemail Transcription" (2nd year); ~550,000 ILS; PI   2010 – 2011

Magneton Funded Project (Ministry of Economy – Chief Scientist) in conjunction with SpeechModules Ltd.; “An Efficient Algorithm for Voicemail Transcription" (1st year); 2010 – 2011

OrienTel – European Commission Project; "Creation of Speech Databases in Hebrew and Arabic"; 2003 – 2006

SALA North America – International Consortium; "Creation of Speech Database in North America Languages"; 2003 – 2006

LILA – International Consortium; "Creation of Speech Database in South East Asia Languages"; 2003 – 2005

LC_STAR – European Commission Project; "Creation of Lexicons for Speech Recognition and Text to Speech"; 2002 – 2005

SALA South America – International Consortium; "Creation of Speech Database in South American Languages"; 2002 – 2005

SpeeCon – European Commission Project; "Creation of Speech Databases for Speech Recognition in the Consumer Market"; 2000 – 2004

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Peer-Reviewed Academic Publications

Lapidot I., Shoa A., Furmanov T., Aminov L., Moyal A. and Bonastre JP (2017). "Generalized Viterbi-based Models for Time-Series Segmentation and Clustering Applied to Speaker Diarization", Computer Speech & Language, Elsevier, February 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2017.01.011

Tetariy E., Bar-Yosef Y., Gishri M., Aloni-Lavi R., Aharonson V. and Moyal A (2016). “Cross-Language Phoneme Mapping for Phonetic Search Keyword Spotting using Multiple Source Languages", Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 24-32, January 2016.

Tetariy E., Bar-Yosef Y., Silber-Varod V., Gishri M., Aloni-Lavi R., Aharonson V. and Moyal A (2015). “Cross-language phoneme mapping for phonetic search keyword spotting in continuous speech of under-resourced languages,” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 72-82, June 2015.

Tetariy E., Gishri M., Aharonson V. and Moyal A. (2013). “An Efficient Lattice-based Phonetic Search Method for Accelerating Keyword Spotting in Large Speech Databases,” International Journal of Speech Technology, Volume 16, Issue 2, pp. 161-169, June 2013.

Books

Moyal A., Aharonson V., Tetariy E. and l Gishri M. (2013). Phonetic Search Methods for Large Speech Databases, Springer Briefs in Speech Technology, New-York, Springer, March 2013 (60 pages).

Conference Proceedings

Furmanov T., Aminov L., Moyal A. and Lapidot I. (2014). "Mahalanobis based Emission Model for Speaker Diarization of Telephone Conversations‏", IEEE 28-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, December 3-5, 2014.

Furmanov T., Aminov L., Moyal A. and Lapidot I. (2014). "Randomization Effect on Iterative-based Speaker Diarization System for Telephone Conversations", IEEE 28-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, December, 2014.

Titariy E., Lotner N., Gishri M., Moyal A. (2014). “A Hybrid Keyword Spotting Approach for Combining LVCSR and Phonetic Search”, 2014 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, July 7, 2014.

Lapidot I., Aminov L., Furmanov t. and Moyal A. (2014). “Speaker Diarization in Commercial Calls”, 2014 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, July 7, 2014.

Bar-Yosef Y., Aloni-Lavi R., Opher I., Tetariy E., Dudy S., Silber-Varod V., Aharonson V. and Moyal A. (2013). “Phonetic-Search in a New Target Language Using Multi-Language Indexing and Phonetic-Mappings”, 2013 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, July 1-2, 2013.

Lotner N., Tetariy E., Silber-Varod V., Aharonson V., Moyal A., Aloni-Lavi R., Bar-Yosef Y. and Opher I. (2012). “Cross-Language Phoneme Recognition for Under-Resourced Languages,” IEEE 27-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, November 14-17, 2012.

Bar-Yosef Y., Opher I., Aloni-Lavi R., Lotner N., Tetariy E., Silber-Varod V., Aharonson V. and Moyal A. (2012). “Automatic Learning of Phonetic Mappings for Cross-Language Phonetic-Search in Keyword Spotting,” IEEE 27-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, November 14-17, 2012.

Levy T., Silber-Varod V. and Moyal A. (2012). “The Effect of Pitch, Intensity and Pause Duration in Punctuation Detection,” IEEE 27-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, November 14-17, 2012

Bar-Yosef Y., Aloni-Lavi R., Opher I., Tetariy E., Lotner N., Silber-Varod V., Aharonson V. and Moyal A (2012). "Cross-Language Phonetic-Search for Keyword Spotting", 2012 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel June 19-20, 2012.

Lotner N., Gishri M., Aharonson V. and Moyal A (2012). "A Multi-Stage Spoken Dialogue Question-Answering (QA) System”, 2012 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel June 19-20, 2012.

Harel I., S. Bernat, T. Slonim, A. Moyal, B. Li and K. C. Sim.  (2011). “Acoustic Spatiotemporal Modeling using Deep Machine Learning for Robust Phoneme Recognition”, 2011 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 20-21, 2011.

Avargel Y., T. Bakish, A. Dekel, G. Horovitz, Y. Kurtz and A. Moyal.  (2011). “Robust Speech Recognition Using an Auxiliary Laser-Doppler Vibrometer Sensor,” 2011 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 20-21, 2011.

Lotner N., M. Gishri, D. Shechnik, A. Moyal and V. Aharonson. (2011). “Applying Natural Speech to Domain-Specific Human-Machine Dialogue”, 2011 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 20-21, 2011.

Har-Lev B., V. Aharonson and A. Moyal. (2010). "An Efficient Phoneme Distance Measure Using a Lexical Tree", IEEE 26-Th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, December 2010.

Tetariy E., A. Moyal and V. Aharonson. (2010). "Phonetic Search Using Anchor-Based Algorithm", IEEE 26-Th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, December 2010.

Shechnik D. and A. Moyal. (2010). "An Efficient Vocabulary Reduction Algorithm for a Very Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Engine”, IEEE 26-Th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, December 2010.

Har-Lev B. and A. Moyal. (2010). “An Efficient Distance Measure for Comparing Phoneme Sequences.” 2010 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 8, 2010.

Shechnik D. and A. Moyal. (2010). “Approaches in Very Large Vocabulary Continues Speech Recognition.” 2010 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 8, 2010.

Tetariy E. and A. Moyal. (2010). “Creating Word Hypotheses Using Anchors”, 2010 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 8, 2010.

Gishri M., V. Silber-Varod and A. Moyal. (2010). “Lexicon design for Transcription of Spontaneous Voice Messages.” In Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Malta, May 19-21, 2010.

Shammas S, O. Gedge and A. Moyal. (2002). “Database Adaptation for Speech Recognition in Cross Environmental Conditions.” In Proceedings of the third international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Las Palmas, May 29-31, 2002.

Shammas S, O. Gedge and A. Moyal. (1998). “Effects of Phonetic Transcription on A Sub Word Based Name Recognition System,” In proceedings of the Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), Tel-Aviv, 1998, pp. 1-4

Golani O., A. Moyal, Y. Himmelhoch, M. Grutman, S. Shammas & Z. M. Rannon. (1997). “Subword based Name Recognition for Information Retrieval Applications.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Processing (ICSP), Seoul, 1997, pp. 469-473.

Moyal A., Z.M. Rannon and I.D. Shallom. (1994). “Advanced Key Word Spotting Algorithm for Vocal Command Recognition in Telephone Network Applications." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal Processing, Applications and Technology (ICSPAT), Dallas, Oct. 18-21, 1994, pp. 1671-1676.

Moyal A., and A. Cohen. (1993). "Speaker Independent Phoneme Recognition using Heuristic Search," In Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology  (EUROSPEECH), Berlin, Sept. 22-25, 1993, pp. 599-603.

Moyal A., and A. Cohen. (1992). "Sequential Phoneme Recognition from Continuous Speech," In Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal Processing, Applications and Technology (ICSPAT), Boston, 1992, pp. 1056-1063.

Moyal A., and A. Cohen. (1991). "HMM Recognition of Hebrew Phonemes," IEEE 17-TH Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Tel-Aviv, May 1991, pp. 285-288.

Office of the President

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