Thomas Hain

Thomas Hain is a Professor of Speech and Audio Technology at the University of Sheffield's School of Computer Science. He is also the Director of the CDT in Speech and Language Technologies and the Liveperson Centre for Speech and Language Technology. His roles include heading the Machine Intelligence for Natural Interfaces group and membership in the Speech and Hearing Research Group and Machine Learning Research Group. Hain is a Fellow of ISCA and AAIA, reflecting his contributions to the field.

He holds a Dipl.-Ing in Electrical/Communication Engineering from the University of Technology, Vienna, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on machine learning applied to speech, audio, and language technologies, including agent modeling and blockchain through his co-founding of fetch.ai.

His work spans speech recognition, enhancement, and emotion analysis, with recent publications emphasizing self-supervised learning, robust ASR, and perceptual metrics. Hain has led several projects, including the AMI/AMIDA systems for meeting transcription and webASR for cloud-based speech technology. His awards include fellowships for advancing speech technology, and he actively contributes to open-source toolkits like EmoBox.