Armin Zundel
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Armin Zundel has received his entire University education at the University of Karlsruhe, achieving his Dr. of Engineering in 1997 in the area Informatics, more specifically model checking for communication protocols. During the later part of the PhD, he was able to start a company together with colleagues in internet and online services. This company exists today and Armin Zundel is one of the CEO's of this 15-person strong company. As an entrepreneur, he was able to start a number of additional small companies, most of these are alive and well today. Dr. Armin Zundel also returned to academia in 2004 by joining the faculty at Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico as a Professor. Together with Dr. Berkling and Dr. Alfredo Cruz this team was able to design, teach and build up the first Master Program in Compuer Science in Puerto Rico. Within 2 years the joint program in Computer Science and Engineering was catering to 80 students, with most of the courses taught by the team. Today, the program continues to grow with a large number of adjunct professors. In 2008, Armin Zundel returned to Karlsruhe as full-time CEO of his company. His interests are now in expanding the company services, growing the company and working with children to reach their full capacity in Mathematics.
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Kay Berkling received her Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Engineering and her Bachelor of Arts & Sciences in German and French from Syracuse University in 1991. In 1996 she received her PhD in Computer Science & Engineering on Automatic Language Identification at 'The Center for Spoken Language Understanding' from the Oregon Institute of Science & Technology in Computer Engineering. After completing three postdoctoral positions at the University of Karlsruhe with Dr. Alex Waibel, the University of Sydney with Dr. Julie Vonwiller and at the Tokyo Institute of Technology with Dr. Sadaoki Furui in the area of foreign accent identification in English speech, she worked in the speech group at MIT, Lincoln Laboratory. Later, she joined the UBS innovation lab, Ubilab, in 2000. After the closing of this lab, she remained another 5 years in Switzerland, this time in the financial industry as e-business consultant before returning to academia by joining Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico as a Full Professor in 2004. There she spent an intense 4.5 years of teaching over 30 classes in Software Engineering, Testing and Architecture as well as programming in the Department of Computer Science. During this time, she has hosted two conference in Puerto Rico, ASRU 2005 and Odyssey 2006. Currently, Kay Berkling is a freelancer living in Karlsruhe, Germany, from where she still teaches onlince courses and is engaged in some research activities regarding children's applications for education. Her research interests include incorporating linguistic knowledge into speech recognition systems as well as accent-, dialect-, and language-identification systems, and computer aided language teaching. Her goal is to breach the educational gap of non-native speakers of any language through the use of tools employing speech recognition. Together with colleagues in the area of speech recognition, she has most recently started the series of Workshops on Computer, Child and Interaction in order to promote the collaboration of various fields of study with the purpose of advancing technology for children's education. Information on this workshop can be found at www.wocci2008.fbk.eu.
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