Shinji Watanabe received his PhD from Waseda University in 2006. He has been a research scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, a visiting scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology and a Senior Principal Member at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), as well as having been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, and an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. He has published more than 100 papers in journals and conferences, and received several awards including the best paper award from IEICE in 2003.