Jean Hennebert Web

Short Story

I am holding an Electrical Engineering and Telecommunication degree as well as a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I now have been accumulating 8 years of experience in private companies and 10 years in research institutions. My skills includes pure IT research, software architecture design, project management and team leading. My expertise is in the area of IT software development in general and more specifically in advanced signal modelling applied to diverse domains such as biometrics, speech recognition, image analysis, environmental data, biomedical sensor signal, etc.

Long Story

I started working since October 93 as a researcher with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. I was directly named in charge of several European research projects in the area of artificial neural networks and speech recognition. During these projects, I had the opportunity to team with Lernhout & Hauspie R&D (now Nuance), Ascom and major university laboratories.

In 95, I started a Ph.D. thesis in the field of artificial neural networks applied to speech and speaker recognition. In the framework of my Ph.D. degree, I had the opportunity to hold for six months a position of visiting researcher in the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) of Berkeley, California. I also took part to the 1997 NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) competition on Speaker Recognition where my algorithms were classified amongst the best. I successfully received my Ph.D. degree in 98.

In 98, I have held a position of System Architect with UBS, largest bank of Switzerland. I was in charge of prototyping and field-testing the next-generation IT systems for the bank, such as voice-activated phonebanking and biometric systems. I managed the development of several voice-activated banking services in English, French and German, conducted multiple field tests for the bank and I was in charge of representing UBS for the European PICASSO project on speaker verification in telephony environment.

In 2000, I co-founded UbiCall Communications SA (Belgium). UbiCall offers advanced voice-activated telephony product and services for telecommunication carriers and corporations. The leading product of UbiCall is Voxplorer Receptionist, an automated attendant for directory dialing in enterprise. As director of technologies, my duties involved products requirements, products development, product quality assessment, team management and pre-sales. As a cofounder and member of the board of administrator of UbiCall, I had also the opportunity to develop experience in company management, team building and found raising.

In october 2004, I joined the DIVA group of the computer science department of the University of Fribourg Switzerland, full time from 2004 to 2007 and part-time until now. I am currently in charge of teaching and research activities. On the teaching side, I am in charge of three classes at the bachelor and master level. I am also directing bachelor, master and PhD student projects. On the research side, I am active in the areas of statistical modelling applied to speech recognition, speaker verification, handwriting recognition, signature modelling, image identification and recently biomedical signals and electricity consumption signals.

During the period 2004 to 2006, I also acted as an independent consultant for several companies.

From 2007 until now, I joined as full professor the University of Applied Sciences HES-SO. From 2007 to 2011, I was delegated to the Wallis part of the HES-SO, in the Business Information System Institute of Sierre. From 2011 till now, I am part of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Engineering College in Fribourg. My activities in HES-SO includes teaching 3 classes at the bachelor and master level and managing research projects from funding to execution. My research with HES-SO includes applied signal processing and machine learning, as well as green-it and it-for-green projects.