Premkumar Natarajan is a professor of computer science. He leads teams, and advises Ph.D. students, in his areas of expertise: novel approaches to face, handwriting, character, handwriting and speech recognition, along with other deep learning and natural language processing directions.

Natarajan joined ISI from Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he served as an executive vice president and principal scientist. As head of BBN’s speech, language, and multimedia business, he founded highly successful computer vision, speech-to-speech translation, and document image processing groups. Natarajan also launched foundational research efforts in computational social science and predictive analytics, along with initiatives that commercialized BBN research into marketable products.

His other leadership roles include serving as organizing chair, co-chair and committee member for major conferences of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and International Speech Communication Association. His latest involvement, Interspeech 2016, occurs in September this year.