Akinobu Lee was born in Kyoto, Japan, on December 19, 1972. He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in information science, and the Ph.D. degree in informatics from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1996, 1998 and 2000, respectively. He worked on Nara Institute of Science and Technology as an assistance professor from 2000-2005. Currently he is a professor of Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan. His research interests include large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, spoken language understanding, and real-world spoken dialogue system. He is a member of IEEE, ISCA, IPSJ and the Acoustical Society of Japan.