Willie Walker joined Sun in early 1997 to help create an accessibility architecture for the JavaTM platform. Walker joined the Speech Group in 1998 and became its principal investigator in 2000. Under his reign, the team helped drive speech as a business prospect for Sun.
Walker also led the effort to create FreeTTS, an open source speech synthesis engine written entirely in the Java programming language that runs 2-4X faster than its native-C counterpart.
Walker is currently the overall lead for Sphinx-4, an open source speech recognition system written entirely in the Java programming language. Sphinx-4 is being developed as a collaboration primarily between Sun, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL). In addition to speech, Walker is also doing research to improve communications between people and groups of people while preserving their privacy.
Prior to joining Sun, Willie worked for Digital Equipment Corporation on the X Window System and Motif. His work on X/Motif included the XKB keyboard extension as well as investigating making the X Window System more accessible to people with disabilities. While there, he also helped found DACX, the Disability Action Committee for X.
* BA Computer Science and Mathematics 1988, Virginia Tech
