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Staff Directory
Ian
M.
Bennett
Program Responsibilities:
Small Business Innovation Research Program Phase I Solicitation FY-2010
(SBIR)
Biography:
Dr. Ian Bennett joins IIP as Information Technology Program (IT) Manager. He received his B.A.Sc. (Hons.) from the University of British Columbia, Canada, followed by his M.S and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. His graduate work and research at Stanford and Stanford Electronics Laboratories in speech analysis and algorithms for the intelligent encoding and compression of speech resulted in the first practical analog processor for speech compression. He joined Hewlett Packard after graduate school and worked in Hewlett Packard Laboratories for seven years. While there he contributed to research in charge-coupled devices (CCD), complementary- and n-channel metal oxide (CMOS & NMOS) semiconductor device development for ultrasonic imaging and computer memory storage, and developed a strong interest in business and entrepreneurship. As an entrepreneur, he founded DBM Inc., one of the early small firms that developed products for the first generation IBM-compatible personal computers. Also as a co-founder of Portacom Technologies, he led the development of the first Windows Accelerator graphics cards - the Eclipse II product, recipient of the "1992 PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award" and ranked Number 74 in "PC Computing Top 200 PC Products of 1992". Other career highlights include responsibility for the systems integration of the Poqet computer - the first pocket-sized MS-DOS computer developed at Fujitsu Personal Systems; technical engineering management at EDS and software development management at E*Trade Financial. As a consultant to the Variable Speech Corp, Tokyo, the analog speech compression technology developed during his Ph.D. research was integrated as a VLSI speech processor chip, and licensed to Sharp, JVC, Tandy, Rolm and General Electric. More recently, as a co-founder of Phoenix Solutions, he developed the natural language query system (NLQS), a question-answer (QA) system that combines distributed speech recognition and natural language (NL) processing technologies. Implemented in English and Japanese, this system incorporates statistics- & semantics-based NL algorithms to answer questions with a single best answer and shortest latency using spoken language input and output. Extensions to this work, supported by NSF, resulted in porting this question answer system to distributed speech recognition architectures incorporating thin clients for spoken language applications such as interactive conversational systems, search, intelligent tutoring systems, form filling, mobile applications and interactive guides. As a consultant, he provided consulting services in computer networking and E-commerce software as well as market research, product and technology analysis to IBM, AT&T, Allied Signal, Hughes Electronics, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NEC among others. As a consultant to several Silicon Valley venture capital companies, he provided professional services for start-up and spin-off companies. He taught engineering, computer science and software engineering courses at Santa Clara University, San Jose State University and at Notre Dame de Namur University. Ten US patents have been issued in the area of distributed speech recognition, natural language processing, distributed search architectures, interactive training systems, solid state device physics and ultrasonic imaging. Over the course of his career he has published nine scientific papers.
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