Information Systems Technology
Technical Biography
Alan V. McCree
Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Information Systems Technology Group
244 Wood Street
Lexington, MA 02420-9108
Alan V. McCree was born in Lower Hutt, New Zealand on April 20, 1960. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering (magna cum laude) in 1981 and the M.E.E. degree in 1982, both from Rice University, Houston, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1992. His thesis research under Professor Thomas P. Barnwell III resulted in the development of the Mixed Excitation Linear Predictive (MELP) speech coder.
Dr. McCree joined the Information Systems Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 2004, where he conducts research in speech processing. From 1993-2004, Dr. McCree worked at Texas Instruments in Dallas, where he was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. His work at TI focused on speech coding, speech synthesis, and noise suppression. He was a key contributor to development of speech coders for digital answering machine, low-cost synthesis, and wireless communication applications, including the 2.4 kb/s MELP NATO Standard. During 1992-1993, he was a consultant in speech coding at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, where he investigated new approaches for generating high quality speech at low bit rates. He was a Senior Engineer at M/A-COM Linkabit, San Diego, CA, from 1984 to 1988. There he developed algorithms for medium rate speech coding, low rate speech coding, waveform coding of telephone modem signals, and echo cancellation, and implemented algorithms in real time on Texas Instruments digital signal processors. As a geophysicist for Shell Oil, Houston, TX, from 1982 to 1984, he used signal processing techniques to improve the interpretation of electromagnetic data.
In 2005, Dr. McCree was elected Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to low bit-rate coding of speech signals. He has published 37 technical papers and been awarded 30 U.S. patents. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and has served as member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech Technical Committee, Technical Chair for the the 2000 IEEE Workshop on Speech Coding, and Technical Committee member for numerous workshops and conferences. He has served on Ph.D. thesis committees at Chalmers University, Tampere University, UCSB, and UCLA. His paper with Dr. Barnwell, "A Mixed Excitation LPC Vocoder Model for Low Bit Rate Speech Coding," received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Outstanding Paper Award in 1997.