This talk will present my experiences on bringing research outcomes to product developments in Toshiba. I developed novel methods for low-bit rate speech coding and text to speech synthesis, and successfully applied them to products. In this talk, I will show three cases where research results were transferred from research to business: Case 1 - speech coding for answering machines; Case 2 - text to speech synthesis for in-car navigation systems; Case 3 - speech intelligibility for public address systems. The method of the last case was from the University of Crete. These cases include how the research project started and resulted in a rich harvest. The talk will continue to discuss insights about the key to success in transferring research results to industry, followed by possible steps for collaboration between academia and industry.
Masami Akamine received the B.E. degree from the University of the Ryukyus, Japan in 1979, the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tohoku University in 1982 and 1985, respectively.
Since 1985 he has been with the Toshiba Research and Development Center working on speech coding, speech synthesis, speech recognition, spoken dialogue and their applications. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Toshiba Research and Consulting Corp., responsible for coordinating research programs among research groups in Kawasaki Japan, Cambridge UK and Beijing China. He has published more than 60 papers in journals and conferences, and has more than 100 granted patents. He has received prestigious awards such as the Purple Ribbon Medal from the Emperor of Japan in 2013, Achievement award in 2012 and Society best paper award in 2003 from IEICE Japan, and many others. He is a senior member of IEEE and had served as a member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee for two years since 2012.
