Laureano Moro-Velazquez, an assistant research scientist in the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP), recently received the Best PhD Thesis Award at Iberspeech 2021.

Iberspeech 2021, which was held virtually from March 24-25, is meant to highlight the work of scientists from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. Every two years, the conference’s committee awards a thesis of PhD students whose research impact Spanish or Portuguese languages. The committee considers, among other things, the impact that the publications extracted from the thesis – such as journal and conference papers – have had.

Moro-Velazquez received the award for his thesis, summarized in the paper titled “New tools for the differential evaluation of Parkinson’s disease using voice and speech processing,” which looks at the detection of Parkinson’s Disease using speech and speaker recognition technologies. The paper also lists Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering associate professor Najim Dehak – who is a CLSP member and mentored Moro-Velazquez during his time at Hopkins as postdoctoral candidate – as an author.

A native of Spain, Moro-Velazquez is humbled to have his research highlighted for contributing to Spanish language technologies.

“The speech and natural language processing (NLP) scientists from Spain are the ones that give the award,” Moro-Velazquez said. “Spain has a lot great scientists that focus their research on speech and NLP, so it means a lot to me that they value my efforts on investigating new tools to diagnose Parkinson’s disease using speech.”