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Philip Rubin
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Haskins Laboratories
300 George Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Haskins Phone: (203) 865-6163, x222
Yale Phone: (203) 764-9353
Haskins Fax: (203) 865-8963


Regular Days at Haskins: Monday - Friday

Chief Executive Officer, Haskins Laboratories
Vice President, Haskins Laboratories
Senior Scientist, Haskins Laboratories
Professor Adjunct, Dept. of Surgery (Otolaryngology),     
    Yale University School of Medicine
Research affiliate, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Chairman of the Board, Discovery Museum and Planetarium
Chair, NAS Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences

Education

B.A., Brandeis University (Psychology and Linguistics), 1971
M.A., University of Connecticut, (Experimental Psychology), 1973
Ph.D., University of Connecticut (Experimental Psychology), 1975

Professional experience

Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Connecticut, 1975-76
Research Staff, Haskins Laboratories, 1975-present
Research Affiliate, Department of Psychology, Yale University, 1991-present
Vice-President, Haskins Laboratories, 1992-present
Professor Adjunct, Department of Surgery, Yale School of Medicine,
1994-present
Chief Operating Officer, Haskins Laboratories, 1998-2004
Chief Executive Officer, Haskins Laboratories, 2004-present

Professional societies

Fellow:
Acoustical Society of America
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Psychological Association

Association for Psychological Science

Yale University's Trumbull College

Member:
Cognitive Science Society
International Speech Communication Association
IEEE
International Society of Ecological Psychology
Psychonomic Society

Founding Chairman of AVISA (the Auditory-Visual Speech Association)

Research Interests

My major theoretical interest has been in understanding the cognitive and biological bases of human perception and performance. I particularly am interested in how complex, human behavior is organized and evolves over time, and also in the relationship between perception and production. My colleagues and I have focused on human communication and language, which bridges the cognitive and biological domains. A long-standing concern of mine has been in understanding how language and cognition are shaped by physiological and ecological considerations, a perspective that has come to be known as embodied cognition. A significant portion of my career has been devoted to the development of tools that have helped other scientists in studying these issues and also helped to shape new theoretical approaches and ways to think about such problems.

My research activities have been focused in a variety of areas. One project involves participation in the development, by a large group of Haskins Laboratories researchers, of a computational model of speech production. This project combines a linguistic-gestural model; a nonlinear model of the control of multi-articulator systems (arms, tongues, etc.); and the Haskins vocal tract model (ASY). My most recent contribution has centered around collaboration on the development and continuing generalization (CASY) of our articulatory speech synthesis model. My interest in modeling aspects of the speech production process has been extended to the area of audio-visual speech, which has involved a collaboration with Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson and his colleagues. This research focuses on the perceptual evaluation of realistic computer-generated AV simulations of speakers, driven by actual acquired physiological data. Eric and I also developed the Talking Heads website.

Another line of research of long standing is my continuing collaboration with Robert Remez at Barnard College. This research involves the use of the sinewave synthesis program (SWS) that I developed as a tool for exploring temporal patterning in speech perception, the characteristics of normal conversational speech, and speaker identity.

Along with Elliot Saltzman, Philip Rubin founded the IS group in the early 1980s to foster cutting edge research across the sciences and encourage collaborations and discussions across institutions.

 

Government Service

From 2000-2003 Dr. Rubin served as the Director of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at the National Science Foundation, where he was responsible for a wide variety of fields including archaeology, cultural and physical anthropology, geography and regional science, environmental social and behavioral sciences, child development, perception, action and cognition, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and social psychology. Other NSF activities included membership on the Science and Technology Centers (STC) coordinating committee and the chairmanship and membership on the Human and Social Dynamics priority area.

Dr. Rubin was the NSF ex officio representative to the National Human Research Protection Advisory Committee (NHRPAC) and the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), 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.

 

Representative Publications

Rubin, P., Turvey, M. & Van Gelder, P. (1976). Initial phonemes are
detected faster in spoken words than in spoken nonwords. Perception and Psychophysics, 19, 394-398. (PDF)
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. (PDF)
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.
Rubin, P., Baer, T., & Mermelstein, P. (1981). An articulatory synthesizer for
perceptual research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 70, 321-328. (PDF)
Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Pisoni, D. B., & Carrell, T. D. (1981). Speech
perception without traditional speech cues. Science, 212, 947-950. (PDF)
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. (PDF)
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. (PDF)
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. (PDF)
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. (PDF)
Fellowes, J. M., Remez, R. E., & Rubin, P. E. (1997). Perceiving the sex and
identity of a talker without natural vocal timbre. Perception & Psychophysics, 59, 839-849. (PDF)
Remez, R. E., Fellowes, J. M., & Rubin, P. E. (1997). Talker identification based
on phonetic information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23, 651-656. (PDF)
Rubin, Philip E. and Löfqvist, Anders (1997). HADES (Haskins Analysis Display
and Experiment System). Haskins Laboratories Technical Report, unpublished. (This is a long (81 pages) document in PDF format).
Vatikiotis-Bateson, E., Tiede, M. K., Rubin, P. E., & Benoît, C. (1997).
Visualization of speech production: For better and for worse. In International Symposium on Simulation, Visualization and Auralization for Acoustic Research and Education - ASVA 97, 233-240. Tokyo, Japan: ASJ.
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. (PDF)
Yehia, H.C., Rubin, P.E., & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (1998). Quantitative
association of vocal-tract and facial behavior. Speech Communication 26, 23-24. (PDF)
Remez, R. E., Pardo, J. S., Piorkowski, R. L., & Rubin, P. E. (2001). On the
bistability of sinewave analogs of speech. Psychological Science, 12, 24-29.
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. (PDF)
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. (PDF)
Rubin, Philip. (2004). NSF reflections. American Psychological Society
Observer, Vol. 17, No. 4, April 2004, 20-22. (PDF)
Thomson, Judith Jarvis, Elgin, Catherine, Hyman, David A., Rubin, Philip E.
and Knight, Jonathan. (2006). Report: Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board. Academe, Volume 92, Number 5, September-October 2006.
Goldstein, L. and Rubin, P. (2007). Speech: Dances of the Vocal Tract.
Odyssey Magazine, Jan. 2007, 14-15. (PDF)
Hogden, J., Rubin, P., McDermott, E., Katagiri, S., and Goldstein, L. (2007).
Inverting mappings from smooth paths through Rn to paths throughs Rm. A technique applied to recovering articulation from acoustics. Speech Communication, May 2007, Volume 49, Issue 5, 361-383.

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