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

V. Documentation of Professional Practice Activities

Appendix

A.I Resume

A.II Supporting Documentation for Teaching and Related Activities

A.III Supporting Documentation for Research and Related Activities

A.IV Supporting Documentation for Service Activities

A.V Supporting Documentation for Professional Practice

A.VI Department Head Letter of Nomination

A.VII Letters of Recommendation from Outside Reviewers

II. 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

III. 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 1982 I was enrolled in MS degree program at the University of Zagreb1. In 1983 I applied for Fulbright Fellowship which I was granted in 1984

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 venue due to industry policies of protecting the technology developed under their company.

Over the years of my education I served as a Lecturer2, Teacher, and Research Assistant, teaching laboratories and conducting research3,4 This work was documented in my publications and public reports that are listed in my CV. I must point out that during the years (1993-2003) I was not allowed to publish due to private US 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. Copies of journal publications are provided for reference in the Appendix of the dossier.

1 One of the oldest Universities in South of Europe Founded in 1669.2 University of Prishitina3 Clemson University4 Post-Doctoral Researcher in the “Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry” of ETH in Zürich

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

I received the 2008-2009 Kerry Bruce Clark Excellence for Teaching. In addition, I have organized and hosted the top scientist in Speech Recognition and Natural Processing area here at FIT: "NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation" 2009.

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 Wuhan, and ones in Dian Ji University, Shanghai. Due to my efforts, we have 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 part of my research engagements with NSF, I have developed a MATLAB tool called: SASE Lab -Speech Analysis and Special Effects Laboratory (Example of the tool attached in Appendix B). This very useful tool is used extensively in serval graduate and undergraduate courses (ECE 3551, 3552, 5525 and 5526).

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.

As a recipient of a grant issued by the US Department of Energy, I and 6 undergraduate students were able to travel to Washington DC, during the summer of 2011, for 3 weeks. Before we traveled to Washington DC for the final stage of the project we were conducting research at FIT.

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 (2004)

Since I joined FIT I taught 10 different undergraduate courses and 7 different graduate courses, I have also provided several students with Special Topics courses. For the complete list of PhD and MS students that I was the major advisor please see the teaching section of the document. I am currently advising 8 Ph.D. students and 5 M.S. thesis students.

My service activities at FL Tech include serving as Faculty Senator for ECE for two years and as a member of the EE Curriculum Committee for 5 years and served in FIT’s hiring committee 4 times.

IV. 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.

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 system5, Alexa -Amazon Speech Recognition, Apple, and Google, are working to achieve the same goal, etc.

The Speech Recognition discipline 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 highly specialized 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 offer this 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 offering this exciting 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 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.To achieve the goal of being exemplary in my pursuit of serving my students I have invested in several curriculum building projects since I joined FIT. I have taught 23 different courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.

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

Most, if not all, of my courses are required by ECE curriculum.

Since I joined FIT in 2003 I taught the following courses:

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 456111. Electric and Electronic Circuits – ECE 4991

Graduate:12. Speech Processing – ECE 552513. Speech Recognition – ECE 552614. Search and Decoding in Speech Recognition – ECE 552715. Android Programming – ECE 557016. Computer Networks 2 – ECE 553517. Digital System Design 1 – ECE 557118. Digital System Design 2 – ECE 5572

All my teaching material is publically available (http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/). In addition, I have instructed over 11 different undergraduate courses and 7 different graduate level courses, as well as a number of different Special Topics courses.

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 5999 Dissertation students.

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

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 32

ECE 5570 12 ECE 5570 16 ECE 5527 15ECE 5590 9

Sub-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 are: Tudor Klein, Xerxes Beharry – both with Microsoft, Ronald Ramadhan – Apple, Sean Powers, Jacob Zurasky both working for local Melbourne company NXT-ID, etc.

I am currently advising 8 Ph.D. students, 19 M.S. thesis students, and 15 undergraduate students

Graduate Student Supervision

I have been or I am the primary thesis/dissertation advisor to 11 Ph.D., 11 MS degree students as well as 15 graduate students.

Below is a list of my graduate students that I am/have serving/served as their Major Advisor:

Ph.D. Students – Primary Dissertation Advisor1. Abdulaziz, Azhar S., PhD CPE2. Al-Khuwaiter, Tahsin A., PhD CPE3. Alfathe, Mahmood F., PhD CPE4. Alshamsi, Humaid S., PhD CPE5. Bohouta, Gamal M., PhD CPE6. Elharati, Hussien A., PhD EE7. Eljhani M. Mohamed, PhD CPE, "Front-end of Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition

System Design on FPGA", Spring 20158. Tamas Kasza, PhD CPE, “Communications Protocol for DF-based Wireless Indoor

Localization Networks,” Spring 2006

M.S. Students-Major Thesis Advisor1. Eljagmani Hamda, MS CPE2. Hasanin Ahmad, MS CPE3. Maryam Najafi, MS CPE4. Anita Devi, MS CPE “Google Speech Recognition using Embedded System,” Spring 20165. Marwa Alzayadi, “Utilizing Sphunx-4 on Speech Recogntion,” Spring 20166. Ashwini Srivastava, “Comparison of Microphone Array Beamforming Algorithms using

Designed Hardware and Microsoft KINEETCT,” Fall 2015

7. Tianyi Bi, MS CPE “Using CMY Sphinx in Standard Chinese Automatic Speech Recognition System Design,”, Fall 2015

8. Zhenmin Ye, MS EE “Design a Step-Up- Tranformer for P300 Wedlgin Power Supply,”, Summer 2015

9. Safa M. Al-Taie, MS ECE “Improving the Accuracy of FIngerpriting Sysem Using Mutibiometric Approach,” Spring 2015

10. Jacob Coughlin, MS EE “Optimizing Wakeup-Up-Word Application for Embedded Deployment,” Spring 2015

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

12. 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

13. Ibrahim Al-Badri, MS CPE “Speech Corpus Generation from YouTube,” Fall 201414. Wilson Burgos, MS CPE “Gammatone and MFCC Features in Speaker Recognition,” Fall

201415. Jacob Zurasky, MS CPE “Digital Signal Processing Applications of the TMS320C6747”,

Fall 201216. Xerxes Beharry, MS CPE “Phoning home: Bridging the Gap Between Conservation and

Convenience,” Fall 201017. Arthur Kunkle, MS CPE “Sequence Scoring Experiments Using the TIMIT Corpus and the

HTK Recognition Framework,”, Spring 201018. Tien-Hsiang Lo, MS CPE “Analysis of Weighted-Sum of Line Spectrum Pair Method for

Spectral Estimation,”, Spring 200519. Elias Victor, MS CPE “1553 Avionics Bus Hardware Integration Into Expendable Launch

Vehicle (ELV) Simulation Model,” Spring 2005

From my point of view, the teaching role includes the integration of classroom instruction with research opportunities in order to provide for the student an environment that is conducive to the broader concept of engineering education. The classroom component is critical, and provides the fundamentals of the engineering disciplines. In this setting I strive to maintain the perspective of the student, making efforts to provide the type of instruction that students find effective and engaging. The challenge of making difficult subjects manageable requires clarity of presentation and implementation of the material through examples such that students connect theory and application. A particular tool that I have found very useful in teaching my undergraduate and graduate level cases is SASE_Lab (Speech Analysis and Special Effects Laboratory); the tool that I have developed while funded by NSF (Co PI). The screen shots of this tool are being provided below:

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

Details of the TIMIT waveform including actual phonetic transcription and categories of sounds that each one represents:

Details of selected sound (red vertical marker in the first plot) is being displayed (1. selection of the sound and the “window” - red, 2. Windowed sound, 3. It’s Fast Fourier Transform – FFT and its LPC spectrum are provided the 4th plot in blue in red color, 4. Mel Filter, and 5. Mel-Filtered Cepstral Coefficients).

One can pick the spectrographic view of the utterance from View Menu which will bring the plot:

This window has a slide-bar which after using it 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) where special effects (Reverberation) are utilized (list is provided in the Effects menu): This tool is available to all with FIT access via this link U:\public_html\ece3551\Lecture Notes\SASE_LAB\gui_test.

The SASE_Lab tool follows the well know Speech Processing-Speech Analysis framework that is being depicted in the graph provided below. This graph depicts one aspect of the usage of the developed technology – detection of disfluencies and other pathological speech impairment.

Academic advising is another role of faculty in ECE. Each year faculty members are assigned a list of advisees (undergraduate). We monitor the progress of these students, provide academic advising (course selection, etc.) and facilitate administrative processes such as registration, declaring intent to graduate, etc. Typically, at any given moment during my time at FL Tech, I have had approximately 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 11Total: 37

Undergraduate MS Degree Students

PhD Degree Students

Total:0

10203040

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 65 700 031 31

29 35 28 26

7443 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 90 140 143 106 127 124 144266 217 186

Total Number of Students per Year

III. Research ActivitiesDue to my prior engagement in private industry, I was fortunate to be part of development of, at that time, a new technology: Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition. Today we are witnessing proliferation of services and devices that deploy precisely the technology that I proud to say I have invented. Notably “Alexa”, Amazons Speech Recognition Technology: http://www.androidcentral.com/amazons-100-million-alexa-fund-will-help-boost-voice-technology-opens-alexa-developers. To that end I have enrolled a team of students from FIT to compete in development of Speech Recognition Applications: ”The Alexa Prize, $2.5 Million to Advance Conversational Artificial Intelligence, September 2016 – November 2017

IV. Service Activities

My service activities at FL Tech include serving as Faculty Senator for ECE for 2 years and as a member of the EE Curriculum Committee for 5 years. In the below pages I have included charts that indicate my activities in Student Advising as well as my Course Load since the year 2016.

The statistics chart is provided by the ResearchGate website is given below as of September 2016: