Profile

Isabel Trancoso is a full professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, Univ. Lisbon), and the former President of the Scientific Council of INESC-ID. She got her PhD in ECE from IST in 1987. She chaired the ECE Department of IST. She was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing and had many leadership roles in SPS (Signal Processing Society of IEEE) and ISCA (International Speech Communication Association), namely having been President of ISCA and Chair of the Fellow Evaluation Committees of both SPS and ISCA. She was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2011, to ISCA Fellow in 2014, and to ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) Fellow in 2024. She was the recipient of the 2024 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement. She launched the speech processing group of INESC-ID, later restructured as L2F/HLT. Her first research topic was medium-to-low bit rate speech coding, on which she worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. After her PhD, her research focus shifted to speech synthesis and recognition, with a special emphasis on tools and resources for the Portuguese language. Her current research scope is much broader, encompassing many areas in spoken language processing. Her recent PhD advising activities cover microblog translation, entrainment in spoken dialogues, disfluency detection, and conversation quality evaluation. She has a particular interest in speech as a health biomarker and privacy preserving speech processing. Her formal retirement (from teaching) in October 2022 did not affect in any way her passion for speech and language research. She is a member of the Supervisory Board of the Marie Curie Doctoral Training Network PSST (Privacy for Smart Speech Technology) and of the ISCA Advisory Council. She chairs the Scientific Board of the Center for Responsible AI (CRAI), and the IEEE Fellow Committee (2024-2025).