Jonathan Allen became involved in speech research in the 1960s at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on semi-automatic telephone information bureaus and vocoder systems. At Bell Labs, he became the Supervisor of Human Factors Engineering in 1966. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and then joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department where his research first centered on speech processing and computational linguistics. In the early 1970s, he worked on the landmark MITalk system for unrestricted text-to-speech synthesis, which culminated in the book he edited with Hunnicutt and Klatt, "From Text to Speech: The MITalk System". This system was especially notable for focusing on all aspects of the speech synthesis problem, but also for the fact that the text analysis components of the system were informed by linguistics. The system included productive models of word formation to handle words not listed in the dictionary, as well as simple parsing for prosody prediction. Jon was involved in all aspects of the synthesis problem, but was particularly interested in the linguistic aspects, including phonology and morphology. He continued this interest in speech synthesis throughout his career.
In 1981, Professor Allen was appointed director of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, and he guided the laboratory's research programme through many changes in direction. He also expanded his own research directions to include computer-aided design techniques for the then emerging field of VLSI design. More recently, he worked on interactive educational software aimed at helping students achieve a deeper understanding of circuits.
Jon Allen was an active member of the research community for many years. He was a Fellow of the IEEE and was recognized with the IEEE Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 1988. He was also a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He became a board member of Computer Speech and Language at its inception, and he remained a supportive member until his death in April this year. This issue of Computer Speech and Language is dedicated to