Dr. Peter Viechnicki, a highly respected technologist with extensive experience as a research manager, has been appointed to serve as Director of the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE).  Viechnicki, who joined the University on 15 September, received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago with a dissertation in phonetics. He brings a wealth of experience from both the government and private sectors and was selected for this position following an extensive search. The HLTCOE was founded in 2007 to focus on research in all aspects of speech and language technologies. Research at the Center explores and develops highly innovative technologies for automatically analyzing a wide range of speech, text, and document data in massive sources of text and speech.