Ami Moyal
# Ami Moyal

Ami Moyal (|עמי מויאל‎; born June 22, 1962) is the third president of Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering. He is a professor in electrical and computer engineering and expert in the field of human machine interaction via speech recognition.

## Biography

Moyal was born and raised in the city of Ashdod, Israel. He completed a science-technology high school matriculation, served as a radar technician in the Israeli Defense Forces and completed three engineering degrees. He then began a career in the Israeli high-tech industry after which he transitioned to academia.

## Education

Moyal holds a Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1993, specializing in speech recognition, with his doctoral thesis titled "Phoneme Recognition from Continuous Speech". In 2017, he was granted the Ben-Gurion University "Honorary Alumni Award".

## Career

### Industry

From 1993 and 2008 he worked for Natural Speech Communication Ltd. (NSC), a developer of speech recognition products for telephony. At NSC he held various positions, including CEO of the company for seven years.

### Public service

Between 2007 and 2011 Moyal served as Chairman of the Board of Directors for ISEF – Israel Scholarship Education Foundation, a organization providing equal access opportunities for education to underserved communities in Israel. In 2010 he was granted the Safra Award for Excellence and Contribution to Israeli Society ).

### Academia

In 2008, Moyal joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering. He also founded and led the Afeka Center for Language Processing (ACLP) – a research and development center for spoken and written language processing. In 2011 he was appointed Associate Professor and in 2014, Full Professor. From 2009 - 2014 he served as Head of the department and in November 2014 was elected President of the College .

## Selected publications

### Books

* Moyal, A., Aharonson, V., Tetariy, E., & Gishri, M. (2013). Phonetic Search Methods for Large Speech Databases. New York: Springer.

### Peer-reviewed papers

* Silber-Varod, V., Latin, M., & Moyal, A. (2017). Frequency of Hebrew phonemes and phoneme clusters in a data-driven approach. Literacy and Language, 5, 22–36.
* Lapidot, I., Shoa, A., Furmanov, T., Aminov, L., Moyal, A., & Bonastre, J.-F. (2017). Generalized Viterbi-based models for time-series segmentation and clustering applied to speaker diarization. Computer Speech & Language, 1–20.
* Tetariy, E., Bar-Yosef, Y., Gishri, M., Alon-Lavi, R., Aharonson, V., Opher, I., & Moyal, A. (2016). Cross-language phoneme mapping for phonetic search keyword spotting using multiple source languages. Artificial Intelligence Research, 2, 24–42.
* Tetariy, E., Bar-Yosef, Y., Silber-Varod, V., Gishri, M., Alon-Lavi, R., Aharonson, V., & Moyal, A. (2015). Cross-language phoneme mapping for phonetic search keyword spotting in continuous speech of under-resourced languages. Artificial Intelligence Research, 2, 72–82.
* Tetariy, E., Gishri, M., Har-Lev, B., Aharonson, V., & Moyal, A. (2012). An efficient lattice-based phonetic search method for accelerating keyword spotting in large speech databases. International Journal of Speech Technology, 2, 161–169.
