Voci Board Member Rutenbar Named Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at Pitt

The University of Pittsburgh announced today that Voci Technologies Board Member Rob Rutenbar has been named the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research. Rutenbar will lead the University’s strategic vision for research and innovation and will be responsibility for establishing a long-term plan for research infrastructure.

Rob Rutenbar received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1984 and then joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent 25 years in Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU, ultimately holding the Stephen J. Jatras (E’47) Chair. In 2010, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Abel Bliss Professor and Head of Computer Science.

His research has focused in three broad areas: tools and algorithms for a wide variety of integrated circuit design problems; methods to manage the messy statistics of nanoscale chip designs; and custom silicon architectures for perceptual and data analytics problems, notably in applications like speech recognition and machine learning. His work has been featured in venues ranging from EETimes to the Economist magazine.

In 1998, he co-founded Neolinear, Inc. to commercialize the first practical synthesis tools for analog and mixed-signal ICs and later co-founded Voci Technologies Inc. to commercialize high-speed, high-accuracy speech recognition appliances for enterprise speech analytics applications.