Klára Vicsi

Between 1971-1975, he was a research assistant at the Acoustics Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a research associate until 1981. Between 1981-1992, he was a research associate at the György Békéssy Acoustics Research Laboratory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Instrument and Measurement Technology Service Ltd. (MMSZ), and then at the Acoustics Research Laboratory of the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (VIK), Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and was a senior research associate from 1992 to 2005. During this period, he worked on the development of person-dependent small and medium-dictionary isolated word speech recognizers (1984-1988), and then on research into the possibilities of extracting speech from noise (1989-1991). He began researching continuous speech machine recognition in 1992, which involves the development of person-dependent, speaker-adaptive, person-independent solutions.

Between 2001 and 2018, he was the head of the Speech Acoustics Laboratory of the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics at the BME VIK; he habilitated in 2007. He is a private university teacher at the BME. He worked with his colleagues on creating an audiovisual speech development and training system for children with speech disorders and hearing impairments.

As the scientific and economic leader of the European INCO COPERNICUS project "Multimedia Multilingual Teaching and Training System for Speech Handicapped Children", he led the multilingual implementation of the computer-based speech teaching and training system (creation of English, Swedish, Slovenian and Hungarian versions). The four-language software system received a nomination for the EIST (European Information Societies Technologies) Prize in 2002 (Prize Nominees).

In the 2010s, he began researching the use of speech as a diagnostic tool and developing voice diagnostic tools (e.g. automatic detection of voice disorders and depression).

He was the director of several domestic and international speech research projects. His research is generally characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. He is the creator of Hungarian language speech databases that serve as the basis for linguistic, phonetic research, and speech recognition work. He is one of the leading experts in multimodal speech training and development methods at the international level.

Member of the Hungarian Association of Telecommunications and Informatics (HTE). Between 2012 and 2017, he was the chairman of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Interdepartmental Standing Committee on Acoustics. He is also a member of (among others) the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Telecommunications Scientific Committee; the Hungarian Association of Optical Acoustics Film and Theatre Technology; the European Speech Communication Association; and the European Student Journal on Language and Speech Scientific Committee.

Awards: Dr. Béla Török Medal of Merit (Organization of the Deaf, 1997); Academic Award (shared award, Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1999); EIST Prize Nominees (2002); Kempelen Farkas Award (Hungarian Phonetics, Phoniatrics and Logopedics Society, 1995); Pollák - Virág Award (HTE, 2003); Békésy Medal (Acoustical Society of America, 2004); László Kozma Memorial Medal (BME Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, 2009); Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit, Civil Division (President of the Republic, 2019).