The speech research community was saddened by the sudden death on 9 January 2002 of Bill Ainsworth, one of our most respected and popular colleagues. Bill was born on 20 July 1939 in Stoke-on-Trent, England, and received his school education locally. He then studied Physics at King's College, London, graduating with first class honours in 1960 and thereafter moved back home to the University College of North Staffordshire, shortly to become the University of Keele in 1962, to pursue his PhD. This was an exciting time with the expansion of higher education in the UK and Bill joined the new Department of Communication and Neuroscience which had just been set up by the noted polymath Donald MacCrimmon MacKay, who had taught Bill at King's and became his PhD supervisor. MacKay was one of the small, close-knit band of ''English cyberneticists'' of the 50's and early 60's (others were Alan Turing, Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, and William Grey Walter) who were convinced that the new science and technology of computation offered untold potential to build brain-like engineering devices with capabilities for learning, adaptation, etc. approaching those of humans -ideas which profoundly influenced Bill and his work throughout his career. Keele's unconventional commitment to multi-and inter-disciplinary research and teaching which so attracted MacKay to set up a new department there, also suited Bill perfectly, and apart from a short spell as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois (1963)(1964), he was destined to remain at Keele for the remainder of his working life, ultimately holding the Chair of Speech Communication (from 1994). It is fitting that Bill also became Research Director of the MacKay Institute, named in honour of his long-time mentor after the latter's death in 1987.
Bill was awarded the first ever PhD of the University of Keele in 1963. His doctoral thesis was founded on MacKay's earlier work in (unconventional) high-speed analogue computing: more specifically on electrolytic growth processes with applications to self-adjusting automata -which these days would be called self-organising systems. Georg Meyer, one of Bill's more recent PhD graduates and a Lecturer at Keele, describes this as ''basically a chemical neural network''. Bill never lost his interest in neural networks and adaptive systems, nor his conviction that information processing in machines and natural organisms must share common principles. These ideas, as well as guiding his research throughout his life, also motivated him to set up (and direct) Keele's MSc program in Machine Perception and Neurocomputing. It is, however, for his work in speech science and technology that Bill is best remembered.
On his return to Keele in 1964, he took up a NATO Research Fellowship to apply adaptive system principles to the study of speech recognition and synthesis. This was the start of a long and fruitful focus on speech research leading to seminal publications not only in recognition and synthesis algorithms, but in speech perception and the applications of new speech technology too.