Alberto Ciaramella (born 1947) is an Italian computer engineer and scientist. He is notable for extensive pioneering contributions in the field of speech technologies and applied natural language processing, most of them at CSELT and Loquendo, with the amount of 40 papers and four patents.
Biography Ciaramella obtained the Laurea in Electronic Engineering and the Post-Laurea in 1969 at La Sapienza University in Rome with Prof. Antonio Ruberti as supervisor of his thesis. Then, he joined CSELT as a research engineer.
In 1975 he patented at CSELT one of the first architecture-independent bootstrap devices that allowed the Gruppi Speciali (the first electronic Italian telephone switch and the most advanced project in Italian in the seventiesLuigi Bonavoglia, CSELT: Trent'anni, 1994 Ed. STET) to start up by pushing a single button from a ROM memory in case of failure.Alberto Ciaramella racconta il brevetto del boostrap dei computer concepito in CSELT, interview by Vittorio Pasteris of the Piemonte Museum of Computer Science
During the 80s, Ciaramella took part in some European projects (Esprit P26, SUNDIALBilli, Roberto, et al. "Interactive voice technology at work: The CSELT experience." Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications, 1994, Second IEEE Workshop on. IEEE, 1994.) in the pioneering field of speech recognition and dialogue systems on many European languages, such as Italian, during which he proposed a method to evaluate the quality of the dialogue systems by comparing the meanings.Danieli, Morena, and Elisabetta Gerbino. "Metrics for evaluating dialogue strategies in a spoken language system." Proceedings of the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium on Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation. Vol. 16. 1995.Ciaramella, Alberto. "A prototype performance evaluation report." Sundial workpackage 8000 (1993).
In 1983, he co-authored one of the first international patents on speaker recognition,Cavazza, Michele, and Alberto Ciaramella. "Device for speaker's verification." U.S. Patent No. 4,752,958. 21 June 1988.DeMori, Renato, and Ching Y. Suen, eds. New systems and architectures for automatic speech recognition and synthesis. Vol. 16. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.Capizzi, Giuseppe N. "Digital speech synthesizer." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 87.4 (1990): 1831-1831. a new research field at that time, applied commercially in a speech recognition software licensed by CSELT.
In 1990, he co-authored one of the first international patents of a real-time speech recognition system integrated in a microprocessor suitable for being used by a telecommunications company:Cecinati, R., Ciaramella, A., Licciardi, L., Paolini, M., Tasso, R., & Venuti, G. (1990). U.S. Patent No. 4,907,278. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.Cecinati, R., Ciaramella, A., Licciardi, L., & Venuti, G. (1989). Implementation of a dynamic time warp integrated circuit for large vocabulary isolated and connected speech recognition. In First European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. the microprocessor was named RIPAC (Riconoscitore di Parlato Connesso - as stated in the patent description itself).Cantoni, Virginio, Gabriele Falciasecca, and Giuseppe Pelosi, eds. Storia delle telecomunicazioni. Vol. 1. Firenze University Press, 2011.APA, (pag.394)
Extensive research was conducted on the Hidden Markov Model aimed at speech recognition tasks, by using small such as big dictionaries and applied to many cases - e.g. the recognition of the children's voice, or browser navigation by voice.Baggia, P., Ciaramella, A., Clementino, D., Fissore, L., Gerbino, E., Giachin, E. P., ... & Rullent, C. (1991). A man-machine dialogue system for speech access to E-mail information using the telephone: implementation and first results. In the Second European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. Other contributions include tests and proposals in international communication standards, such as VoiceXML."Tecnologia matura e finalmente aperta - Intervista ad Alberto Ciaramella", Computer World, November 2001
In 2001, the CSELT's voice technology group became Loquendo, and Alberto Ciaramella became Competitive intelligence supervisor of the company.
In 2005, Ciaramella founded IntelliSemanticIntelliSemantic at the Incubator of Politecnico di Torino, an innovative company that works in the field of Competitive Business Intelligence. Also within his present company, he continues the research in the field of applied language technologies. In 2010, he co-authored a paper about his view on the application of the emerging "semantic" technologies to patent analysis,Bonino, Dario, Alberto Ciaramella, and Fulvio Corno. "Review of the state-of-the-art in patent information and forthcoming evolutions in intelligent patent informatics." World Patent Information 32.1 (2010): 30-38. which became popular in the field of Patent Informatics, and took part in the Topas European projectBrügmann, S., Bouayad-Agha, N., Burga, A., Carrascosa, S., Ciaramella, A., Ciaramella, M., ... & Müller, A. (2015). Towards content-oriented patent document processing: Intelligent patent analysis and summarisation. World Patent Information, 40, 30-42. focused on patent summarisation.
Bibliography Billi, R., Canavesio, F., Ciaramella, A., & Nebbia, L. (1994, September). Interactive voice technology at work: The CSELT experience. In Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications, 1994., Second IEEE Workshop on (pp. 43–48). IEEE. Pirani, Giancarlo, ed. Advanced algorithms and architectures for speech understanding. Vol. 1. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013. Billi, Roberto, ed. Tecnologie vocali per l'interazione uomo-macchina. Nuovi servizi a portata di voce, CSELT, 1995, . (Italian)
References
External links A bit of History: Alberto Ciaramella Biography (in Italian)