Fernando C. N. Pereira

Pereira's seminal contributions to speech and language processing systems have greatly impacted AI science and technologies. His weighted Finite-State Transducer revolutionized speech recognition. His Conditional Random Fields machine learning model is widely used for natural language processing (NLP), genetics, protein folding and computer vision. His parsing, semi-supervised learning, and entity resolution contributions provide state-of-the-art question-answering -- far beyond simply applying Machine Learning (ML) to Big Data. As head of Google's NLP/ML group he’s led Google's growth to the world’s most innovative NLP company, improving Google Search and Assistant with a much more detailed understanding of language(s) than simple Information Retrieval.