Promotion Dossier

Veton Z. Këpuska

Associate Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Florida Institute of Technology

Contact Information

Olin Engineering Room 353

Phone: 321-674-7183

E-mail: vkepuska@fit.edu

Table of Contents

I. Brief History of the Candidate

II. Teaching and Related Activities

III. Research and Scholarly Activities

IV. Service Activities

I. SummaryYears in Grade 13th Assistant Professor since January 2003.Teaching and Related Activities

Consistent Record of Teaching Excellence One Post-Doctoral Student Graduated 3 PhD Students, 6 others are admitted to candidacy. Graduated 20 MSci students, 19 of whom with the Thesis. Served as Graduate Committee Member for 6 PhD Students Served as Graduate Committee Member for 6 MSci Students Developed and Taught 4 Graduate and 5 Undergraduate Courses. Listed in Albanian American Success Stories Kerry Bruce Clark Teacher of the Year : 2008 – 2009 Hosted and Participated in International "NIST Rich

Transcription Evaluation" Workshop 2009 Featured in http://forwardflorida.com/florida-technology-

industries/remote-voice-recognition/ Listed in the Group of former Post-Doctoral Collaborating

Partners in University of ETH Switzerland. https://www1.ethz.ch/igp/photogrammetry/people/formermembers

II. Brief History of the CandidateMy name is Veton Këpuska and I joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Florida Institute of Technology in January 2003 as an Associate Professor.

In July 26 1969 I was one of ½ Billion people on the planet watching Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon. It was that moment in my life that awoke in me an insatiable curiosity for everything American. The more I learned about US the more I wanted to be in this country. In the meantime, I continued to study and be an exemplary student in sciences and mathematics. I was very fortunate that the top professors from the Mathematics and the Theoretical Physics departments of our university1 created a special high school for the gifted students. I was one of the students admitted to this special High School. While we were required to study the regular high school curriculum we were tasked with studying graduate college level math and sciences taught by University Professors. It was during my high school years that I learned to commit to long hours of study and discipline that proved invaluable in my pursuit of studies later in life. I graduated from high school in 1976 with a diploma work: “Experimental Methods for Measurements of the Speed of Light.” In 1981 I received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Prishtina, Kosova with a thesis “The use of the Analog Computers for Simulation and Automatic Control.” After graduation, due to my high GPA scores and exemplary performance as undergraduate student I was hired as a Junior Lecturer at the University of Prishtina.

In 1982 I was enrolled for my MS degree program at the Univeristy of Zagreb2. In 1983 I applied for Fulbright fellowship which I was granted in 1984. My long dream of coming to US was finally a reality. I became e full time graduate student at Clemson University in Fall of 1984. I graduated with M.S. degree in Computer. Engineering in 1986, and Ph.D. degree also in Computer Engineering August of 1990. One of the requirements of The Fulbright Fellowship was so called a 2-year home rule which required my return to the country of origin and contribute for 2 years in the economy of the country. However due to the fact that my province was under Marshall Law at the time and my University was shut-down, the alternative was to go somewhere else in Europe and hope that the political turmoil in my country would end. In September of 1990 I started work as Post-Doctoral Research Associate in prestigious European University “Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule” (ETH) of Zürich 3 until May 1993. During that time, I conducted research with Swiss National Science Foundation in Image Understanding: “Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences.”4 Due to the eruption of war in former Yugoslavia I decided to come back to the US. After spending three years in Western Europe. I came to the conclusion that I would rather live and work in US. My family and I relocated to 1 At that time we only had one university; University of Prishtina, in our Kosova province.2 Founded in 1669.3 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, IGP, ETH-Hönggerberg, CH-8093 Zürich Switzerland.4 http://www.igp.ethz.ch/en/

Boston MA where I worked in Speech Recognition area as a Speech Scientist, conducting research for various Boston-based companies: 1993-1997 Voice Processing Corporation, 1997-1999 BBN Technologies, 1999-2001 Nuance, and 2001-2003 Think Engine Networks. In January of 2003 I accepted Associate Professor Post at Florida Tech. When I was invited to teach at Florida Tech I considered the opportunity with great care and thorough evaluation of my personal goals. I came to the conclusion that by joining the faculty at Florida Tech my contribution to the future generations would have meaning and substance. My experience in Industry would provide a platform for teaching and preparing our students to enter the workforce prepared with real life solutions that the industry faces as well providing my students with exiting and engaging problems for their projects that give them an understanding of real life challenges that faces the industry and of course thorough theoretical background of the computer engineering and science. I believed at the time that my years in industry as well as my relative youth would be a good bridge for University teaching which I truly love and am very grateful for the opportunity it has provided for my career goals. The greatest benefit that teaching has provided for me is to be able to share all the knowledge that I have accumulated while working at the industry that I was unable to share through publishing or conferences or any other public domain due to industry policies of protecting the technology developed under respective companies.

Over the years I served as a Lecturer5, Teacher, and Research Assistant, teaching laboratories and conducting research6,7. This work was documented in my publications and public reports is provided in my attached CV. Note, that during the years (1993-2003) I was not allowed to publish due to company policies.

My recent research and scholarly activities have led to publishing of 28 conference papers and public reports, 22 peer-reviewed journal publications, and 1 book chapter, all but two publications were done during the time since I received my Associate Professorship. Links of some of more relevant journal publications that are provided for reference in the Appendix of the dossier. After joining FIT I did establish Speech Processing, Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing graduate level program. Recently I have introduced Android Programming graduate level course. With the same vigor I have applied myself in revamping the curriculum of Microcomputer 1 & 2 as well as Multifarious Systems 1 & 2 by offering a completely new curriculum.

After accepting the faculty position at FIT I have instituted a completely new way of handling the final examination: “Final Project.” This in turn required a completely new way of instituting the final exam: e.g., development of web tool to allow students to choose the day and time when they want final exam taken (see below the screen shot of the interface). This tool allows me to pick the day, time-frame of exam, and the length of each examination. The students are able to

5 University of Prishitina6 Clemson University7 Post-Doctoral Researcher in the “Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry” of ETH in Zürich

log into this web-based system (development by me and my student) and pick the time when they want to be examined that serves them the best. Note that the tool was designed with full administrative privileges for myself that allows me to reject a specific chosen proposed time (this will automatically trigger an email informing the affected party about this action). This is one example of how I am preparing the students for industry experience by focusing them on the final result. Most of the students are very happy with this tool and the exam.

Another distinguishing fact is that all my students have an “Open Door” policy when meeting with me. Coupling this with a new way of teaching my graduate and undergraduate level courses provides the bases of my success. All of the above mentioned points show a distinct method of teaching that I have developed.

Two typical examples of responses of satisfied students are provided to make that point:

“Dr. Kepuska handled my equivalency test for this course. He worked with me over a period of three weeks to ensure all was in order prior to the test project being due. He is very helpful and will spend as much time as you need helping to make sure you get it. Great professor.”

“Nice guy who wants to see you tackle a DSP design project to show you understand basic integration of software and hardware.”

I have served as principle investigator or co-principal investigator, in over 22 NSF preproposals, as well as on number of projects supported by DARPA, EPA, Quantum Technology Sciences, etc. Also recently I served as NSF reviewer. My funded research support totals over ~$300,000. In addition I have served as reviewer for NSF in 2016.

I received the 2008-2009 Kerry Bruce Clark Excellence for Teaching.

I was part of selected group of University Professors from Florida Institute of Technology that are participating in the ongoing collaboration between several Chinese Universities. Since this collaboration started, I have taught 4 times in Hubei University, and ones in Dian Ji University. Due to my efforts, we received 10 Chinese visiting scholars, and 8 undergraduate students in fall of 2016 alone. In addition, I have hosted one Post-Doctoral research scientist from Azerbaijan in 2014 as well as single-handedly I have organized and hosted the top scientist in Speech Recognition and Natural Processing area here at FIT: "NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation" 2009.

III. Teaching and Related ActivitiesMy teaching methodology and practice was recognized by Kerry Bruce Clark Teacher Award 2009. This award is attributed to the achievements presented below.

In spring 2010 FIT has become the first University in the world to introduce a new curriculum in Microcomputer Systems 2 utilizing state-of-the-art Texas Instruments DaVinci Embedded Hardware Platform and its BIOS Operating System. For further information please contact Wicks, Cathy; Director of University Programs at TI (c-wicks@ti.com).

Speech recognition is becoming a mainstream technology that the new generations are embracing it at a fast pace. FIT has positioned itself in the forefront of teaching this technology by having the foresight to provide me with the opportunity to teach the speech recognition courses. In the past few years we are witnessing a proliferation of speech recognition technologies: just recently Microsoft announced achieving parity with human performance with its artificial speech recognition system8, Alexa -Amazon Speech Recognition, Apple, Google, are working to achieve the same, etc.

I am very excited with the fact that the Speech Recognition is being accepted in the mainstream culture. This development provides for more opportunities for students, future scientist and professionals that are engaged or would like to engage in this discipline.

Since I joint FIT (2003), I have proposed the set of four courses covering developments of this exciting area: Speech, Speech Processing and Natural Language Understanding.

Speech Processing – ECE 5525 Speech Recognition – ECE 5526 Search and Decoding in Speech Recognition – ECE 5527 Acoustics of American English Speech – ECE 5528

This fact puts the FIT, at the forefront of this scientific and engineering revolution. When I joined FIT in 2003, there were only few institutions in the world that offered only one course covering speech recognition area –FIT approved 4 brand new courses in this field that I am still teaching today, putting our department ahead of other teaching institutions of this very exiting technology. It also became a magnet for new students that were interested in pursuing speech recognition at graduate level. I consider myself fortunate to join FIT who had the foresight to allow me to offer those courses to our students.

Selecting and offering the above mentioned courses was only the beginning. I spent a lot of time and energy in developing and designing the coursework for these courses that lacked proper

8 http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-beats-humans-at-speech-recognition-2016-10

teaching material, which I developed from scratch. It is the same dedication that I committed to the undergraduate courses, and the lab exercises that accompany these courses that I was selected to teach. Having had come from the industry I revamped the courses to bring them up to date with industry standards.

To achieve the goal of being exemplary in my pursuit of serving my students I have invested in curriculum building. Since I joined FIT I have taught 23 different courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. The list of my courses is avaiable through my public U drive and is provided below in highleted section:

Most, if not all, of my courses are required by ECE curriculum. Since I joined FIT in 2003 I taught at FIT the 18 following courses at the undergraduate and graduate level:

Undergraduate:1. Hardware Software Design – ECE 25512. Hardware Software Integration – ECE 25523. Signal and Systems – ECE 32224. Digital State Machines – ECE 35415. Microcomputer Systems 1 – ECE 35516. Microcomputer Systems 2 – ECE 35527. Multifarious Systems 1 – ECE 35538. Multifarious Systems 2 – ECE 45539. Computer Architecture – ECE 455110. Computer Communications - ECE 4561

11. Electric and Electronic Circuits – ECE 4991 Graduate:

12. Speech Processing – ECE 552513. Speech Recognition – ECE 552614. Search and Decoding in Speech Recognition – ECE 552715. Acoustics of American English Speech – ECE 552816. Android Programming – ECE 557017. Computer Networks 2 – ECE 553518. Digital System Design 1 – ECE 557119. Digital System Design 2 – ECE 55729

Note that all my teaching material is publicly available through U drive access (http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/). In addition, I have instructed over 11 different undergraduate courses and 8 different graduate level courses, as well as a number of different Special Topics courses (not listed). The list of course taught since 2006 is provided below with the enrollment figures. Note that the table below does not include ECE 5999 Thesis, nor ECE 6999 Dissertation.

2006 Total 77Spring Summer Fall

ECE 2551 2 - 0 ECE 3551 29ECE 2552 20 - 0 ECE 3552 1ECE 5526 1 - 0 ECE 3553 13

ECE 4553 6ECE 5525 5

Sub-total 23 Sub-total 0 Sub-total 54

2007 Total 90Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3551 16 - 0 ECE 3551 29ECE 3552 11 - 0 ECE 3552 1ECE 4800 2 - 0 ECE 3553 16

ECE 4553 6ECE 5525 4ECE 5527 5

Sub-total 29 Sub-total 0 Sub-total 61

2008 Total 140Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3551 20 ECE 3222 12 ECE 3541 11ECE 3552 18 ECE 3541 16 ECE 3551 17ECE 5526 10 ECE 5570 2 ECE 3553 18

ECE 4553 6ECE 5525 6

Sub-total 48 Sub-total 31 Sub-total 61

2009 Total 143Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3551 42 ECE 2552 11 ECE 3551 31ECE 3552 17 ECE 3222 18 ECE 3553 13ECE 5526 2 ECE 5595 2 ECE 5527 7Sub-total 61 Sub-total 31 Sub-total 51

9 The courses using the blue color are required courses in ECE department.

2010 Total 106Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 18 ECE 2551 27 ECE 3551 37ECE 5526 6 ECE 2552 1 ECE 3553 17ECE 5570 2 ECE 5595 1 ECE 5525 6

ECE 5595 1Sub-total 26 Sub-total 29 Sub-total 51

2011 Total 127Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 15 ECE 2551 17 ECE 3551 52ECE 5526 12 ECE 3222 9 ECE 3553 8

ECE 4561 9 ECE 5527 5Sub-total 27 Sub-total 35 Sub-total 65

2012 Total 124Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 15 ECE 2551 11 ECE 3551 50ECE 5526 8 ECE 4561 7 ECE 3553 9ECE 5570 2 ECE 5527 7

ECE 5570 5Sub-total 25 Sub-total 28 Sub-total 71

2013 Total 144Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 10 ECE 2551 17 ECE 3551 57ECE 5526 14 ECE 3551 9 ECE 3553 16ECE 5570 13 ECE 5527 8Sub-total 37 Sub-total 26 Sub-total 81

2014 Total 266Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 21 ECE 3222 41 ECE 3551 73ECE 5526 21 ECE 3551 17 ECE 3553 14ECE 5570 34 ECE 5525 16 ECE 5527 23ECE 5595 2 ECE 5595 4Sub-total 78 Sub-total 74 Sub-total 114

2015 Total 217Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 21 ECE 3551 11 ECE 3551 53ECE 5526 32 ECE 5525 16 ECE 3553 32ECE 5570 12 ECE 5570 16 ECE 5527 15

ECE 5590 9Sub-total 65 Sub-total 43 Sub-total 109

2016 Total 186Spring Summer Fall

ECE 3552 29 ECE 5525 15 ECE 3551 53ECE 5526 29 ECE 5570 15 ECE 3553 17ECE 5570 12 ECE 5595 4 ECE 5527 12Sub-total 70 Sub-total 34 Sub-total 82

I have been advisor to many Ph.D., MS as well as undergraduate students; few notable graduate students were: Tudor Klein, Xerxes Beharry -Microsoft, Ronald Ramadhan – Apple, Sean Powers, Jacob Zurasky NXT-ID Inc., Brandon Schmitt, Chih-Ti Shih, Raymond Sastraputera, etc.

Please visit the link “Speech Vibrations” which will provide the most current explanation of the speech recognition courses offered. I am proud to say that FIT has become part of the very prestigious universities that offer speech recognition courses and research opportunities for our students, like Harvard and MIT etc.

The depth of offered curriculum at FIT completely covers this fascinating area of human communication chain: from the sound vibrations produced by speech, speech signal processing, pattern recognition as applied to speech modeling, speech recognition, natural language understanding and acoustics of American English. In addition to those courses that I have introduced at the onset after joining FIT, I started to offer another graduate level course, ECE 5570 Embedded Android Programming. This course has grown in demand; the last time (Summer 2016) I have offered the course, it attracted 15 graduate students.

Ph.D. Students – Primary Dissertation Advisor Abdulaziz, Azhar S., PhD CPE Al-Khuwaiter, Tahsin A., PhD CPE Alfathe, Mahmood F., PhD CPE Alshamsi, Humaid S., PhD CPE Bohouta, Gamal M., PhD CPE Elharati, Hussien A., PhD EE Mohamed Eljhani, PhD CPE, “Front-end of Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition System

Design on FPGA”, Spring 2015 Al Ghamdy Amin O., 2010 Tamas Kasza, PhD CPE, “Communications Protocol for DF-based Wireless Indoor

Localization Networks,” Spring 2006

M.S. Students-Major Thesis Advisor Eljagmani Hamda, MS CPE Hasanin Ahmad, MS CPE Maryam Najafi, MS CPE Anita Devi, MS CPE “Google Speech Recognition using Embedded System,” Spring 2016 Marwa Alzayadi, “Utilizing Sphunx-4 on Speech Recogntion,” Spring 2016 Ashwini Srivastava, “Comparison of Microphone Array Beamforming Algorithms using

Designed Hardware and Microsoft KINEETCT,” Fall 2015 Tianyi Bi, MS CPE “Using CMY Sphinx in Standard Chinese Automatic Speech

Recognition System Design,”, Fall 2015 Zhenmin Ye, MS EE “Design a Step-Up- Tranformer for P300 Wedlgin Power Supply,”,

Summer 2015 Safa M. Al-Taie, MS ECE “Improving the Accuracy of FIngerpriting Sysem Using

Mutibiometric Approach,” Spring 2015 Jacob Coughlin, MS EE “Optimizing Wakeup-Up-Word Application for Embedded

Deployment,” Spring 2015

Boopathy Prakasam, MS EE “Microphone Array for Speech Processing and Recognition,” Spring 2015

Wenyang Zhang, MS CPE “Comparing the Effect of Smoothing and N-gram Order: Finding the Best Way to Combine the Smoothing and Order of N-gram,” Spring 2015

Ibrahim Al-Badri, MS CPE “Speech Corpus Generation from YouTube,” Fall 2014 Wilson Burgos, MS CPE “Gammatone and MFCC Features in Speaker Recognition,” Fall

2014 Jacob Zurasky, MS CPE “Digital Signal Processing Applications of the TMS320C6747”,

Fall 2012 Mohammed Almeer, MS CPE Patarapong Rojanshien, MS CPE “Speech Corpus Generation from DVD’s of Movies and

TV series”, Fall 2010 Xerxes Beharry, MS CPE “Phoning home: Bridging the Gap Between Conservation and

Convenience,” Fall 2010 Arthur Kunkle, MS CPE “Sequence Scoring Experiments Using the TIMIT Corpus and the

HTK Recognition Framework,”, Spring 2010 Raymond Sastraputera, MS CPE, “Prosodic Features for Wakeu-Up-Word Speech

Recognition”, 2009 Chih-Ti Shih, MS CPE “Use of Pitch and Enegy of the Speech Signal for Discrimination of

‘Alerting’ from ‘Referential’ context”, 2009 Za Hniang Za, MS CPE “A Study of Approaches for Microphone Array Signal Processing”,

2008 Tien-Hsiang Lo, MS CPE “Analysis of Weighted-Sum of Line Spectrum Pair Method for

Spectral Estimation,”, Spring 2005 Elias Victor, MS CPE “1553 Avionics Bus Hardware Integration Into Expendable Launch

Vehicle (ELV) Simulation Model,” Spring 2005

Ph.D. Students – Advisory Committee Member Shakre Elmane, Dynamics in Recommendations of Updates For Free Open-Source Software Jim Bryan, A Robust Speaker Identification Algorithm Based On Atomic Decomposition and

Sparse Redundant Dictionary Learning, 2016 Scott Meredith, PhD ECE, “Lightning Generated Electric and Magnetic Fields: a

Methodology into the Development of Three Models and Their Utilization in Determining the Currents Induced within a Three-wired Tether”, 2011

Mohamed ???, ECE PhD, 2010 Igor Lugach, PhD MEA, “Effect of Accurate and Simplified Interactions Modeling in a Null-

Flux Electromagnetic Levitation System on Performance of Multi-DOF Sliding Model Controller” 2006

Michel Ouendeno, PhD CPE, “Image Fusin for Improved Perception”, 2007

MS. Students – Advisory Committee Member

Subhadra Subramanian, , EE, 2016. Taher Parekh, Real Time Implementation of an Inertial Measurement Unit based on Fiber-

Bragg Sensor arrays using Legendre polynomials, Mechanical Engineering, 2016 Hai Hoang Truong Tran, A Comparative Study of Relational Database Server Performance

on Windows vs. Linux, Computer Science and Cyber Security, 2015 Chih-Ti Shih, MS ENM, 2009 Patric Durland, MS SYS, “Project Arcade”, 2009 Osaam Saraireh, MS ES, 2007 Rachan Varigiya, MS CS, “Keyword Spotting Using Normalization of Posterior Probability

Confidence Measures”, 2004

A particular tool that I have found very useful in teaching my undergraduate and graduate level classes is the tool that I have developed while funded by NSF (Co PI) the screen shots of which is being provided in the research section of my dossier (e.g., SASE_Lab; Speech Analysis and Special Effects Laboratory).

Furthermore, this innovative teaching style is focused on maximizing students "exit knowledge" rather than relying only on the test scores. Therefore, in all my courses I require from students to demonstrate mastering of the subject area by developing a practical application combining theory with an appropriate application. The demonstration requires students to verbally defend their work through: (1) Presentation, (2) Detailed Documentation (Microsoft Word, README file, source code, etc.) depicting their work, and (3) Implementation and a demonstration of the project. The following link: Example Project exemplifies a typical project outcome from one of my graduate courses and this link: Example Project2 is one from my undergraduate level courses.

Each project is assessed based on detailed instructions for the project requirements that is provided as a reference file to my U drive in know course location. This document resides in each corresponding class link under “Final Project Requirements document” as exemplified in the following link:

http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/ece3551/Final%20Project%20Requirements.doc.

The examination and quality of assessment of the project is conducted by providing each student with at least 30min time slot to present his/her work. Large classes require 2-3 days of presentation times starting from 8:00 am-12:00 pm, and 1:00pm-6:00pm to complete the examination. Note that registering for a time slot is done with the www based application (see for example http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/web/courses.php#ece3551-projects

The slide that I often use to describe the process of human speech production (see figure below) is very relevant in helping to understand the methodology of how we could use the speech in helping imparted students.

During my time at FIT I have had over 30 student advisees. In addition to advising roles for both undergraduate and graduate students, I am the faculty advisor to the IEEE-HKN engineering honor society Zeta Epsilon Chapter here at Florida Tech.

Student Advising (2016):

Undergraduate 15MS Degree Students 11

PhD Degree Students 11

Total: 37Undergraduate MS Degree

StudentsPhD Degree

StudentsTotal:

010203040

15 11 11

37Student Advising 2016

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 20160

50

100

150

200

250

300

23 29 48 6126 27 25 37

78 65 700 0

3131

29 35 2826

74

43 34

54 61

61 51

5165 71

81

114

10982

Number of Students per Semester

Spring Summer Fall

Year

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 20160

50100150200250300

050100150200250300

77 90140 143 106 127 124 144

266217 186

Total Number of Students per Year

IV. Research and Related ActivitiesToday we are witnessing a proliferation of speech oriented services and devices that deploy the technology that I am one of the inventors. Please refer to the list of patents bellow.

• Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Using Frequency Distributed Distance Measures, US6983246 B2, January 3, 2006.

• Frequency Distribution of Minimum Vector Distance for Dynamic Time Warping, WO 2003100768 A1, April 1, 2006.

• System and Methods for Facilitating Collaboration of a Group, US 20110134204 A1 June 2009

Exploiting Differences in Correlations for Modeled and Un-Modeled Sequences by Transforming Trained Model Topology in Sequence Recognition, Provisional Patent Application, August 2009

My research activities led to contributions in the area of Speech Recognition; for further information please see the following link to my published book chapter: http://www.intechopen.com/books/speech-technologies/wake-up-word-speech-recognition.

Recently I have enrolled a team of my graduate and undergraduate FIT students in a very exciting competition that would allow our team to potentially win $2.5 million dollars for research in speech recognition and speech understanding area. Please follow the link provided for further information about this competition: https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize

Since 10 years ago, I have focused on expanding opportunities for my undergraduate students to participate in research that traditionally was reserved for graduate students. Typical example is my research project funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE). I took 6 FIT students for two weeks to Washington DC during the summer of 2011. Before we traveled to Washington DC, for final stage of the project, we were conducting research at FIT in the area of Energy. The paper “Energy Savings from using Mobile Smart Technologies”, under the supervision of Paul Karaffa, DOE fellow, was published in 2013.

Këpuska, V. et al. (2013). Energy Savings from using Mobile Smart Technologies, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, doi: 10.1063/1.4811096, 2013

Some of the highlights of my achievements are provided in the table below:

2015 IMG-LAB. Image Analysis Laboratory using MATLAB 2014 Zëri Inc. Founded a Speech Recognition Company, www.zeriinc.com2013 SASE-LAB - Development of Speech Analysis and Recognition

Laboratory using MATLAB.2012 NSF I-Cops. Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition.

2011 FaST - Calculate Potential Energy Savings-from Using Mobile Smart Technologies.http://scie nce.energy.gov/wdts/fast/project-descriptions/2011-projects/epa-calculate-potential-energy-savings-from-using-mobile-smart-technologies/

2009 Organized and Hosted at FIT NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop, "NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation" 2009

2008 – 2009 Kerry Bruce Clark Teacher2008 Greatest Commercial Potential - "Smart Room" Senior Design 2008.2007 Third Place in IEEE SouthEastCo. Student Hardware Competition:

Basketball Robot2007 Best Junior Design 2007 - Visual Audio2006 Best Paper Nomination "2006-472: A MATLAB TOOL FOR SPEECH

PROCESSING, ANALYSIS AND RECOGNITION: SAR-LAB"2005 UML-ADI Assistive Device Competition, June 2005, University of

Massachusetts Lowell MA, First Placehttp://faculty.uml.edu/Mufeed_Mahd/UML_ADI/photo_fit.htm

1984 – 1985 Fulbright Fellow1987 – 1988 Harris Fellow1977 – 1979 Univeristy of Prishtina FellowTRDA Developed a web portal with my graduate students for TRDA of

Melbourne in collaboration with Nterspec.

PPT Commander PPT Commander – A Voice Only Activated Power Point Presentation Application

Apple Ported PPT Commander to Apple Mac OS

Voice-Activated Elevator Simulator

Developed Voice Activated Elevator Simulator:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5CeVtQMvK0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ8eyBTbS_E

Nursing Call Station Developed a Nursing Call Station Voice Only Activated interface for patients. Researching for ways to extend its capability for the patient to control its bed, TV and other devices connected to the system.

BMW Developed a Voice Activated Car Inspection System prototype for BMW:http://files.me.com/hardcaseron/l3byyd.mov

High-Speech Currency Bill Reader

Designed and Developed a High Speed Currency Bill Reader system using Embedded Hardware.

NIST Hosted and Participated in International "NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation" 2009

First Place: Analog Devices

First Place in the First Annual Analog Devices & University of Massachusetts DSP Contest 2005 (Brian Ramos and Don McMann),http://faculty.uml.edu/Mufeed_Mahd/UML_ADI/photo_fit.htm),

Third Place Third Place in IEEE SouthEastCon 2007 Student Hardware Competition: Basketball Robot among 38 Universities (Ronald Ramdhan, Xerxes

Beharry & Sean Powers). http://www.southeastcon.org/2007/students/. The robot is displayed in Deans Conference Room.

Best Paper Best Paper Nomination " 2006-472: A MATLAB TOOL FOR SPEECH PROCESSING, ANALYSIS AND RECOGNITION: SAR-LAB" ASEE 2006 (undergraduate co-authors Rogers N., Patel M.),

Best Junior Design Best Junior Design 2007 - Visual Audio - (Brandon Schmitt).

Greatest Commercial Potential

Greatest Commercial Potential - "Smart Room" Senior Design 2008. (Matt Hopkins, David Herndon, Patrick Marinelli).

Speech Analysis and Special Effects Laboratory (SASE_Lab) - Matlab ToolAs part of my research engagements with NSF, I have developed a MATLAB tool called: SASE Lab -Speech Analysis and Special Effects Laboratory. This very useful tool, see below, is used extensively in serval of my graduate and undergraduate level lectures.

Opening Screen of the TIMIT waveform (selected by clicking the File Menu of the SASE_Lab application tool) is presented:

Details of the TIMIT waveform including actual phonetic transcription and categories of sounds that each one represents is automatically displayed by the tool as well, as is depicted in the figure below:

Details of selected sound (red vertical marker in the first plot below) are automatically being displayed (1. Arbitrary selection of the sound depicted with red vertical line by clicking on the sound itself, 2. Selected sound and the overlaid window depicted in red, 3. Windowed sound, 4. It’s Fourier Transform – FFT and its LPC Spectrum provided in red, 5. Mel Filter, and 6. Mel-Filtered Cepstral Coefficients).

One can pick the spectrographic view of the utterance from View Menu of the SASE_Lab tool:

This window has a slide-bar which after using it (selecting a specific sound out of all recordings) we get this image of 1 sec of speech:

This tool (SASE_Lab – Speech Analysis and Spatial Effects Laboratory) is extensively used in my Speech classes (ECE 5525, ECE 5526, and ECE 5527) as well as in my undergraduate level classes (ECE 3551 and ECE 3552).

A special effects (e.g., Reverberation, among 8 other) is selected from the list (e.g., list is provided in the Effects menu as displayed in the figure above). This tool is available to all with FIT access via the provided link U:\public_html\ece3551\Lecture Notes\SASE_LAB\gui_test.

Integration of Students in the ResearchMy most important research and educational contribution to Florida Tech, is my dedication to involving undergraduates in research. All my achievements with the students were done with undergraduate students or with graduate students that were raised from FIT undergraduate ranks (e.g., Tudor Klein, Sean Powers, Brandon Schmitt, Xerxes Beharry, Ronald Ramdhan, Raymond Sastraputera, Chris Hellriegel, Pattarapong Rojansthien, etc.). In particular (i) my heavy focus on undergraduate research that produced a wealth of outcomes especially over the past 3 years, (ii) establishment of reputable collaborative partnership with industry, and (iii) for a major educational collaboration that I have contributed through collaborative work that I have done with Dr. Anagnostopoulos and other faculty at FIT and elsewhere (FGCU, UCF).

The support for research that I have conducted since I have joined FIT comes from my industry partners and from government sponsored programs. My research activity draws on my past extensive experience in conducting cutting-edge Research and Development work for the top companies in the world.

As of now, I consider my main scientific contribution to be the solution that I have invented in the area of my specialty: Speech Processing and Recognition (e.g., Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition). I have solved a difficult problem for which there are no other appropriate solutions. The problem can be summarized as discrimination between a target word/phrase having a wake-up or alerting context (e.g., “Alex, I need to talk to you.”) from that same word/phrase in a referential context (e.g., “Today I talked to Alex on the phone.”). I have developed a revolutionary speech recognition technology (called Wake-Up-Word or WUW for short) that solves this problem. This solution can change how we can interact with computers. Furthermore, this solution can be applied to general speech recognition problem thus improving their accuracy over 1,500%-30,000% providing solutions that approach human performance.

The solution is protected by my two US patents: ("Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech" US # 7,085,717, and "Dynamic time warping using frequency distributed distance measures", US # 6,983,246). Those patents are referenced in by following patents:

7,437,291 Using partial information to improve dialog in automatic speech recognition systems

7,143,034 Dynamic time warping device for detecting a reference pattern having a smallest matching cost value with respect to a test pattern, and speech recognition apparatus using the same

7,085,717 Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech

5,455,889 Labeling speech using context-dependent acoustic prototypes

I strongly advocate and practice teaching approach that bridges the gap between theory and practice. This approach has allowed me to establish a number of strategic partnerships with industry: ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com), iCVn (http://www.iCVn.com), QTSI (http://www.qtsi.com), PCB (http://www.pcb.com), Knigh's Armament Company (http://www.knightarmco.com), BMW, Microsoft, etc.

With industry partnerships I have been able to support me and my student’s research. The current total amount of direct support from industry exceeds $250,000.

For example, ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com) supported my research in speech recognition for first 2.5 years at FIT. For more information please consult my Résumé and/or contact a former senior Vice Presidents of Research: Geoffrey Parkhurst: gparkhurst@symphonixllc.com and Paul Gagne: paul@rpm-communications.com (detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section).

In addition, through my industry collaborators, I have brought in equipment worth well over $100,000. In the collaboration with iCVn of Baltimore my team has designed a new hardware that will augment the Shinwoo money counting device with a scanner capable of reading serial numbers from any currency (e.g., US Dollars, UK Pounds, SW Franks, European Union Euros, etc.), configured by software that we are also developing. We have also re-designed and re-implemented their core application software that now connects to the Shinwoo device and communicates with it. For further information please contact Theodore Paraskevakos, President and CEO at tgp@icvn.com (detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section).

During the first half of 2006 I have completed a very import pilot study for QTSI of Cocoa Beach utilizing my Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition Technology to Seismic Signals. The achieved results from this study, according to professionals in that field, are the best compared to up-to-date currently published reports.

PCB, an internationally recognized corporation, has donated over $5,000.00 worth of specialized industrial quality equipment consisting of high precision microphones and data acquisition equipment for microphone array research. In addition PCB is partnering with myself for NSF’s MRI research proposal to establish a largest microphone array laboratory in the south east. Contact information: Ray Rautenstrauch rraut@pcb.com.

Additional notable collaborations are listed below:

BMW – Actively working with Dr. Joachim G. Taiber, BMW Group, Head of IT Research Office, Information Technology Research Center (ITRC), Greenville South Carolina.

Tudor Klein and Microsoft - Working with Microsoft through my former Graduate Student, Tudor Klein, to establish an appropriate relationship to contribute development

of their new-generation of speech recognition software. Contact information tuklein@exchange.microsoft.com.

NIST, Speech Group - I have enrolled an FIT team (Arthur Kunkle and Dileep Koneru) in NIST sponsored evaluation effort, Rich Transcription Evaluation Project, with a goal to further advance speech recognition area. At a moment I have two graduate students actively involved in this project that if successful will bring significant attention to FIT. The goal of our participation is not only to use existing technologies but also to incorporate my inventions into existing systems (e.g., HTK and Sphinx) demonstrating their superiority over conventional methods.

PowerPoint Commander is voice activated Power Point presentation software application that I was planning to offer. This application was a cross platform (Windows as well as Apple OS) is the result of research and developed that I have done over the past 8 years. This application incorporates my Wake-Up-Word (WUW) Speech Recognizer. It enables users to control their power-point presentation program using voice only. The uniqueness of the application is the ability of the technology to distinguish a presentation speech from the speakers command. For example:

Presentation Speech: "Processing of speech signal requires application of short time analysis. The overall process is depicted in the block diagram presented in the next slide."

Command: "Computer! Go to Next Slide."

Although speech recognition technology has been around for over 25 years, it has to be emphasized that this kind of accuracy performance required by this application has not been developed by any commercial or research institutions yet, and thus my WUW technology has a potential to revolutionize the way we communicate with computers.

I have submitted a $10-Million multi-institutional, collaborative Center of Excellence proposal, as co-PI to the Florida Board of Governors. The proposal ended up being among the top 10 proposals in scientific merit as judged by the prestigious Oak Ridge Associated Universities reviewers (ORAU: Top 10 in Scientific Review Ranking). My contribution as judged by my pears was critical to the scientific merit ranking of the proposal (see Dr. Rodriguez recommendation).

Two (2) NSF projects were awarded (totaling $260,000) and 1 is pending ($1,198,728). I have also submitted 3 proposals: to Rockwell Collins, State of Florida and Lindberg Ann Foundation as PI/Co-PI totaling $2,156,012. In addition I have submitted a number of SBIR proposals, one of which was invited proposal by National Institute of Justice (NIJ) of the US Government. Succinctly put, I have generated or I have been involved in generation of on average greater than 3.3 proposals per year.

A plethora of additional outcomes are the fruit of two major projects (totaling $260,000): (1) EMD-MLR project sponsored by NSF and supported through grant DUE-CCLI-0341601 of $99,996 under the Course, Curriculum and Laboratories Improvement (CCLI) program and the

Educational Materials Development (EMD) track, and (2) AMALTHEA project (AMALTHEA REU Site) also sponsored by NSF under the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program and grant IIS-REU-0647018 for $160,701 over a period of 3 years (2007-2010). I am a Co-PI that played a crucial role in its successful execution as elaborated in detail in Supporting Documentation for Scholarly and Research Related Activities section.

A few more notable research achievements in addition to previously noted are provided below. In 2012 I was awarded I-Corps NSF grant through which I have established Zëri Corporation (www.zeriinc.com) which in turn provided an excellent opportunity for my graduate students to engage in scientific and entrepreneurship skills.

In 2009 I have organized and hosted at FIT “NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop”. For details of this workshop follow this link: http://itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/rt/2009/index.html

My students have won the Third Place in IEEE Student Hardware Competition, Best Junior Design for Visual Audio, Best Paper Nomination, and a First Place in the First Competition for Assistive Device (2005).

V. Service and Related Activities My service activities at FL Tech include:

Reviewing for various entities: o “The New University Researchers Start-up Program of Fonds de recherche du

Québec”, by Guy Tremblay, Ph.D, Program Manager, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies, 140 Grande Allée East, Quebec City, QC, CANADAG1R 5M8, Phone: 418 643-3439, Fax: 418 643-1451, Email: guy.tremblay@frq.gouv.qc.ca

o I was invited to serve as reviewer for NSF in 2016. Meeting ID: P161746 Meeting Name: NRT Engineering III Panel, Meeting Start Date: 04/11/2016, Meeting End Date: 04/13/2016. Panel Leader: Richard A. Tankersley, Ph.D., Program Director, NRT, IGERT, GK12 and GROW, Division of Graduate Education National Science Foundation.

o I am serving for over 5 years as Editor in Chief at the “Scientific & Academic Publishing”; http://www.sapub.org/journal/editorialdetails.aspx?JournalID=1045&PersonID=10112.

o Also I serve as reviewer for a number of journal publications including: Springer Journal’s Editorial Office, International Journal of Speech

Technology Advances in Research Neural Networks

o Expert Reviewer for security clearance for FIT students. Most recently: NC04 - Cardinal, Patrick (207070) - Expert : Këpuska, Veton (KEPVE1601

Served as Faculty Senator for ECE for two years, Member of the EE Curriculum Committee for 5 years, FIT’s hiring committee 4 times. In 2009 I have organized prestigious NIST Workshop

http://itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/rt/2009/index.html for which I have received a high marks for organizing this workshop.

uCollaborator CoalitionAs a result of Dr. Rodriguez (FGCU) and my efforts, we have created the uCollaborator Coalition of Excellence (uCE, pronounced "you see") gathering researchers from Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida Institute of Technology and University of Central Florida (Institute for

Simulation and Training) and industrial partners (further details provided in the following link www.ucollaborator.com). Currently, uCE is engaging in research, development, and commercialization of a new breed of ubiquitous collaboration technologies. And, recently, the coalition has submitted a couple of grant proposals for developing an open-platform to connect the physical and virtual worlds both synchronously (same time) and asynchronously (anytime, anywhere). I took the lead on one of them (NSF-IIS 905145: RI:HCC:Medium:RUI: uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support).

Conferences and Related ActivitiesDuring 2008/2009 year I have actively participated in NIST RT Evaluation. This activity culminated with:

Organization and Hosting of the NIST RT 2009 Workshop. Participation in the evaluation of the RT technologies that was developed at FIT Securing of NIST MARK III 64 microphone array for R&D and data collection. Initiated and Organized a Hosting Cite at FIT and Hosted NSF REU Webinar.The review of the quality of organization of the event is provided under Error: Reference

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In 2004 & 2005 I and Dr. Marius Silaghi have proposed and introduced a Special Speech Processing and Recognition track in FLAIRS. This task entailed hosting the www site with the information about the new track, collecting the papers, recruiting reviewers, organizing, conducting and managing the peer review process, and notifying the conference chair of the final list of accepted papers. In addition I have also served as a session chair to both of those sessions. In total I have served as char in 3 conferences (FLAIRS 2004 & 2005) as well as ASEE 2006. In ASEE I was invited to serve as a session chair. In addition, my paper also was nominated for best paper award out of total of 9 nominated papers - Këpuska V., Rogers N., Patel M., (2006). A MATLAB Tool for Speech Analysis, Processing and Recognition: SAR-LAB, ASEE, Chicago, 2006. (Best Paper Award Nomination).

ReviewingI have served as a professional reviewer for the: Wiley and Sons book “Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music”, by Gold, Morgan. In addition I have served as reviewer for Elsevier Journals Speech Communication, Neural Networks, Nonlinear Analysis Theory and Methods, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (2007), ACM Symposium on Applied Computing – NLSP (2008), FLAIRS (2005 and 2006); First Conference on Information Technology and Engineering Sciences, Kosova (2007). Also, I have served as Reviewer for Academic Advancement of Dr. Dimitrios Charalampidis - ECE department of University of New Orleans. In the past, prior to joining FIT I have often served as reviewer for the International Journal of Speech Technology, IEEE ICASSP, ICSLP.

AdvisingI typically advise 25-35 undergraduate students each year, and directly work with at least 2 junior and senior design teams most of whom distinguished by their accomplishments:

Best Junior Design 2007 - Visual Audio - (Brandon Schmitt). Greatest Commercial Potential - "Smart Room" Senior Design 2008 (Matt Hopkins, David

Herndon, Patrick Marinelli).I also serve as advisor to Chi Phi student society here at Florida Tech. The Chi Phi

Fraternity was awarded the Dr. Thomas Gehring Award for Chapter Excellence in 2007.

CommitteesAdditional service activities include representing ECE department in FIT's Graduate Curriculum Committee (2003-2005). Served as member of Department Head Search Committee (2007) as well as currently (2008-2009). Serving in ECE department's ABET and Curriculum Committee. In addition as the only Computer Engineering Faculty with a Computer Engineering Degree I advice directly my Department Head in all matters regarding to Computer Engineering Curriculum.

OutreachMy activities contributed to university's outreach efforts through AMALTHEA and EMD-MLR; NSF funded projects; I have represented FIT in Harris Engineering Week several times (2004-2008), LASER DAY (2005-2007) and personal presentations at BCC, Melbourne L.B. Johnson Middle School, Cocoa Beach High School. Finally I am serving as a judge in science fair for Central Brevard Catholic Homeschool Group (2007, 2008, 2009) (e-mail: homeschoolsciencefair@earthlink.net).

CBD Board of DirectorsSince 2000, I served as a member of Board of Directors for a non-governmental human-rights organization "Center For Balkan Development". For more information please see http://www.friendsofbosnia.org/who_board.html.

Recruiting StudentsOften, I interview potential undergraduate students considering FIT as their

undergraduate institution. Example of thankful response of a parent of a perspective student is attached: Parent E-Mail of Potential Student