Roberto Pieraccini Joins Tell-Eureka as CTO

NEW YORK - Tell-Eureka named Roberto Pieraccini to its executive management team as chief technology officer.  Pieraccini will direct future development of Tell-Eureka's LevelOne Virtual CSR product suite as well as new offerings.

Pieraccini joins Tell-Eureka from the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he managed the Conversational Interaction Technology department, which focused on improving the development process and the quality of human-machine spoken communications.  Before that, he led the natural dialog group at SpeechWorks (now ScanSoft).  In 1990, he joined the Speech Research Group at ATandT Bell Labs and later ATandT Labs. He started his career with CSELT (now Telecom Italia Lab) after completing his doctorate of engineering degree from the Universita' degli Studi di Pisa, Italy.  Pieraccini holds several patents and has authored more than 100 publications on the subjects of speech recognition, language modeling, language understanding and dialog.  He is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences and academic symposia.

"Roberto Pieraccini has the unique combination of skills in both research and the real world and I'm confident of his continued contribution to the advancement and commercial success of speech technology," said Dr. Larry Rabiner, a pioneer in computer speech and author of four books in the field.  "He is a tremendous asset for Tell-Eureka and the company will greatly benefit from the depth of his knowledge and practical experience." Rabiner, an ATandT fellow and former VP of research for ATandT Labs, is currently professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers University and University of California, Santa Barbara.