Philip Rubin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Philip E. Rubin (born May 22, 1949, in Newark, New Jersey) is an American cognitive scientist who since 2003 has been the Chief Executive Officer and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. He is also a Professor Adjunct in the Department of Surgery, Otolaryngology at the Yale University School of Medicine and a Research Affiliate in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. He is also known as a civic scientist who has been involved with issues of science advocacy, education, funding, and policy.

Contents

[edit] Education

Philip Rubin received his BA in psychology and linguistics in 1971 from Brandeis University and subsequently attended the University of Connecticut where he received his PhD is experimental psychology in 1975 under the tutelage of Michael Turvey, Ignatius Mattingly, Philip Lieberman, and Alvin Liberman.

[edit] Career

Philip Rubin's research spans a number of disciplines, combining computational, engineering, linguistic, physiological and psychological approaches to study embodied cognition, most particularly the biological bases of speech and language. He is best known for his work on articulatory synthesis (computational modeling of the physiology and acoustics of speech production), sinewave synthesis, signal processing, perceptual organization, and theoretical approaches and modeling of complex temporal events, and continues active research collaborations with colleagues at Haskins, Yale, and other institutions.

During his time at Haskins Laboratories, Rubin has been responsible for the design of many software systems. Most prominent are SWS [1], the Haskins sinewave synthesis program and ASY [2], the Haskins articulatory synthesis program. SWS has been used by Robert Remez, Rubin, David B. Pisoni[3], and other colleagues and researchers to study the time-varying characteristics of the speech signal. In addition to use in standard articulatory synthesis, the ASY program has been used as part of a gestural-computational model[4] that combines articulatory phonology, task dynamics[5], and articulatory synthesis. With Louis Goldstein and Mark Tiede[6], Rubin designed a radical revision of the articulatory synthesis model, known as CASY [7], the configurable articulatory synthesizer. This 3-dimensional model of the vocal tract permits researchers to replicate MRI images of actual speakers and has been used to study the relation between speech production and perception. He is also the designer of the HADES signal processing system and the SPIEL programming language.

He is co-creator, with Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson[8], of the Talking Heads website[9] and a co-founder, with Elliot Saltzman [10] of the IS group. He was also the founder of YMUG (the Yale Macintosh Users Group)[11] and the publisher of The Desktop Journal.

From 2000-2003 Rubin was the Director of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS)[12] at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia. He was the NSF ex officio representative to the National Human Research Protection Advisory Committee (NHRPAC)[13] and the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP)[14], established to provide advice to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on issues related to the protection of human research subjects. He was also the co-chair of the inter-agency National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Science (COS) Human Subjects Research Subcommittee (HSRS) under the auspices of the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and was also formerly the co-chair of the HSRS Behavioral Research Working Group. Since leaving government service, he has continued to be active on human subjects issues as they relate to public policy, including lecturing, writing, co-authoring an AAUP report[15], participating in activities of the Yale Bioethics Center[16] and serving on the advisory board of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics[17].

Rubin is also presently the Chair of the National Academies Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences[18]. He is also the Chairman of the Board of the Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is married to Joette Katz, Associate Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

[edit] Selected publications

  • Rubin, P., Turvey, M. T., & Van Gelder, P. (1976). Initial phonemes are detected faster in spoken words than in spoken nonwords. Perception and Psychophysics, 19, 394-398.
  • Fowler, C. A., Rubin, P. E., Remez, R. E., & Turvey, M. T. (1980). Implications for speech production of a general theory of action. In B. Butterworth (Ed.), Language Production, Vol. I: Speech and Talk (pp. 373-420). New York: Academic Press.
  • Rubin, P., Baer, T., & Mermelstein, P. (1981). An articulatory synthesizer for perceptual research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 70, 321-328.
  • Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Pisoni, D. B., & Carrell, T. D. (1981). Speech perception without traditional speech cues. Science, 212, 947-950.
  • Kelso, J. A. S., Holt, K. G., Rubin, P., & Kugler, P. N. (1981). Patterns of human interlimb coordination emerge from the properties of non-linear, limit-cycle oscillatory processes: theory and data. Journal of Motor Behavior, 13, 226-261.
  • Browman, C. P., Goldstein, L., Kelso, J. A. S., Rubin, P. E., & Saltzman, E. (1984). Articulatory synthesis from underlying dynamics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 75, S22.
  • Saltzman, E., Rubin, P. E., Goldstein, L., & Browman, C. P. (1987). Task-dynamic modeling of interarticulator coordination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 82, S15.
  • Remez, R. E. & Rubin, P. E. (1990). On the perception of speech from time-varying attributes: Contributions of amplitude variation. Perception & Psychophysics, 48, 313-325.
  • Remez, R.E., Rubin, P.E., Berns, S.M., Pardo, J.S. & Lang, J.M. (1994). On the perceptual organization of speech. Psychological Review, 101, 129-156.
  • Rubin, Philip E. (1995). HADES: A Case Study of the Development of a Signal System. In R. Bennett, S. L. Greenspan & A. Syrdal (Eds.), Behavioral Aspects of Speech Technology: Theory and Applications. CRC Press, Boca Raton, 501-520.
  • Hogden, J., Rubin, P. & Saltzman, E. (1996). An unsupervised method for learning to track tongue position from an acoustic signal. Bulletin Communication Parlee 3, 101-116.
  • Rubin, P. & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (1998). Measuring and modeling speech production in humans. In S. L. Hopp & C. S. Evans (Eds.), Animal Acoustic Communication: Recent Technical Advances. Springer-Verlag, New York, 251-290.
  • Rubin, P., & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (1998). Talking heads. In D. Burnham, J. Robert-Ribes, & E. Vatikiotis-Bateson (Eds.), International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing - AVSP’98 (pp. 231-235). Terrigal, Australia.
  • Rubin, Philip. (2002). The regulatory environment for science: Protecting participants in research. In Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson, and Stephen J. Lita (eds.), AAAS Science and Technology Policy Yearbook 2002. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., 199-206.
  • Sieber, Joan E., Plattner, Stuart, and Rubin, Philip. (2002). How (Not) to Regulate Social and Behavioral Research. Professional Ethics Report, Vol. XV, No. 2, Spr. 2002, 1-4.
  • Rubin, Philip. (2004). NSF reflections. American Psychological Society Observer, Vol. 17, No. 4, April 2004, 20-22

[edit] External links