Biing-Hwang (Fred) Juang has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Juang holds the Motorola Foundation Chair Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

Election to NAI Fellow status is a high professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. The NAI Fellows will be inducted by Deputy U.S. Commissioner for Patents Andy Faile, from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, during the 3rd Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors, on March 7, 2014, in Alexandria, Va., at the headquarters of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Juang is among the 143 innovators elected to NAI Fellow status who represent 94 universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes. Together, they hold more than 5,600 U.S. patents. Included in the 2013 class are:

•          26 presidents and senior leadership of research universities and non-profit research institutes;

•          69 members of the National Academies (IOM, NAS, NAE);

•          five inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame;

•          six recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation;

•          two recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Science; and

•          nine Nobel Laureates, among other major awards and distinctions.

Juang has published close to 300 papers during his time both in industry and at Georgia Tech, where he is a member of the Center for Signal and Information Processing. He holds over 20 patents in the areas of speech analysis, coding, recognition, and enhancements; speaker authentication; machine learning; and stochastic processes. His current areas of research and educational focus are in immersive communication, intelligent communication, and natural communication. Most recent innovations developed under Juang’s tutelage include a world-first real-time full-duplex hands-free stereo teleconferencing system.

Prior to coming to Georgia Tech in 2002, he was the director of Avaya Labs and held many technical leadership roles during his 20-year career at AT&T Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies. While in industry, Juang led a team that is credited with such important inventions as the electret microphone, the network echo canceller, a series of speech CODECs, key algorithms for signal modeling and automatic speech recognition, and the development of a speech server for applications such as AT&T's advanced 800 calls and the Moviefone.

Juang is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an academician with Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and a Fellow of both IEEE and Bell Labs. He is also the 2014 recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, which recognizes his pioneering contributions to automatic speech recognition and speech coding.

“We are very fortunate to have someone of Fred’s caliber and experience on our faculty,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “His work has brought great benefit to the world and in how we communicate both on the job and for fun everyday. The School is thrilled that he has received this very high and well-deserved honor.”