Mark Gales

Mark Gales is Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and an Official Fellow at Emmanuel College. He is currently on sabbatical leave for the 2024/25 academic year. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a consultant at Roke Manor Research Ltd, developing radar systems, before transitioning to speech and language processing.

• PhD in 'Model-Based Techniques for Robust Speech Recognition' (University of Cambridge, 1995)
• BA in Electrical and Information Sciences (University of Cambridge, 1988)

His research focuses on speech and language processing, particularly in automated language assessment and low-resource speech technology. He leads the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) Institute, which collaborates with Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUP&A) to develop commercial tools like Linguaskill and Speak & Improve. These platforms provide automated spoken/written assessment for millions of users globally.

Recent publications highlight his work in LLM-driven speech processing, including adversarial attacks on foundation models, end-to-end spoken error correction, and uncertainty estimation frameworks. His team's research spans multilingual capabilities, with deployments in languages ranging from Dholuo to Tok Pisin.

• Awards: IEEE Fellow, ISCA Fellow
• Leadership: Fellows' Steward at Emmanuel College

Mark has contributed extensively to Hidden Markov Model (HMM) applications in speech recognition, which underpinned early automatic speech systems. His work now bridges LLM-based language assessment with cross-lingual transfer learning and robustness testing for real-world deployments.