Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Chin-Hui Lee won the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award as part of the 2027 IEEE Technical Field Award cohort.

The Technical Field Awards are some of the IEEE’s highest honors and recognize researchers for their contributions, technical achievements, leadership in their field, and for making a lasting impact on technology, engineering, and society worldwide.

Lee, who received the top Speech and Audio Processing award, was recognized for his work and leadership in automatic speech and speaker recognition, including innovations in adaptive learning and discriminative training.

His research interests focus on signal processing and machine learning methods applied to speech and language processing.

His work spans statistical modeling, pattern recognition, and developing algorithms for speech recognition, natural language understanding, and robust communication systems. He investigates computational techniques that improve machine comprehension and communication.

Lee joined the ECE faculty in September 2002 after 15 years working in industry at Bell Laboratories, where he became a distinguished member of technical staff and director of the dialogue systems research department.

During his time, he helped develop a keyword recognition patent that was implemented in Bell Labs Speech Solutions, a board widely deployed for AT&T’s Voice Recognition Call Processing operator service since 1992 and won him the prestigious BL President's Gold Award in 1998.

He joined academia in 2001, spending a year as a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing.

Lee has published over 600 papers and 30 patents, with more than 34,700 citations and an h-index of 90 on Google Scholar.

This is the latest of many academic recognitions Lee’s received for his work, having also won six best paper awards from the Signal Processing Society (SPS), the SPS Technical Achievement Award for “Exceptional Contributions to the Field of Automatic Speech Recognition'' in 2007, and the International Symposium on Computer Architecture Medal in Scientific Achievement for “Pioneering and Seminal Contributions to the Principles and Practice of Automatic Speech and Speaker Recognition'' in 2012.

It's the second year in a row that an ECE professor has received an IEEE Technical Field Award. Suman Datta won the 2026 Andrew S. Grove Award.