About Us
BAHRC LLC has access to subcontractors with a wide range of skills in Speech and Language Technology, including people with research, development, and teaching experience. We put together the right team for your project.
Dr. Beth Ann Hockey
Beth Ann Hockey is the
CTO and Managing Director of BAHRC LLC. She has a Bachelors degree in
Linguistics from UC Davis, an MSE in Computer Science and a Ph.D in Linguistics
from the University of Pennsylvania, and over 20 years of experience in
computational linguistics and speech and language technology.
During her time as a NASA contractor, Dr. Hockey was a founding member of the NASA AMES RIALIST spoken dialogue group. She was the project lead as well as a principle designer and developer of the Clarissa Procedure Navigator. The Clarissa system, designed to assist astronauts in executing procedures on the International Space Station, became the first spoken dialogue system used in space on June 27, 2005 when it was tested by astronaut John Phillips on the ISS. While at NASA Ames, she was also the lead for the HOWe Open Source spoken dialogue system, a core developer for the Regulus Open Source project, and PI of the NASA Intelligent Systems "Robust Reusable Speech Recognition" project. She is also a developer for the MedSLT medical speech translation project. Her areas of expertise include spoken dialogue systems, language modeling, dialogue management, targeted help systems, grammar development, speech translation, discourse and phonetics.
She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics and a Senior Research Scientist at UC Santa Cruz. At UC Santa Cruz, she is the PI of a UC Santa Cruz/Ford Motors research project on dialogue in cars, and the instructor for an innovative course on Spoken Dialogue Systems. In addition to University teaching, she has provided professional level training through formal and informal Regulus tutorials.
Dr. Hockey is the author of over 50 refereed publications and is a co-author of the book "Putting Linguistics Into Speech Recognition: The Regulus Grammar Compiler" (2006 CSLI Press). This book offers technical documentation and a detailed tutorial on the Open Source Regulus System.