Najim Dehak received his PhD from School of Advanced Technology, Montreal in 2009. During his PhD studies he worked with the Computer Research Institute of Montreal, Canada. He is well known as a leading developer of the I-vector representation for speaker recognition. He first introduced this method, which has become the state-of-the-art in this field, during the 2008 summer Center for Language and Speech Processing workshop at Johns Hopkins University. This approach has become one of most known speech representations in the entire speech community.

Dr. Dehak is currently a faculty member of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, he was a research scientist in the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in machine learning approaches applied to speech processing, audio classification, and health applications. He is a senior member of IEEE and member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee.

Awards and Honors

• The IBM Best Student Paper for the IEEE Odyssey Workshop 2006 (special recognition)
• Student travel grant for the IEEE Odyssey Workshop 2006
• Open Performance Emotion Sub-Challenge prize in INTERSPEECH 2009
• IEEE Signal Processing Society 2012 Young Author Best Paper Award (The I-vector Journal paper) 2012