Frederick Jelinek, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Frederick Jelinek

Czech linguist

Date of Birth: 18-Nov-1932

Place of Birth: Kladno, Central Bohemian Region, Czech Republic

Date of Death: 14-Sep-2010

Profession: computer scientist, pedagogue

Nationality: Czech Republic

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio

Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing.
He is well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".Jelinek was born in Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of World War II and emigrated with his family to the United States in the early years of the communist regime.
He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught for 10 years at Cornell University before being offered a job at IBM Research.
In 1961, he married Czech screenwriter Milena Jelinek.
At IBM, his team advanced approaches to computer speech recognition and machine translation.
After IBM, he went to head the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years, where he was still working on the day he died.