Roberto has been at the leading edge of spoken dialog technology for more than 25 years, both in research as well as in the development of commercial applications. The use of statistics for language understanding, machine learning for spoken dialog systems, and advanced models of dialog management are among his most known contributions to the field. Prior to joining SpeechCycle, Roberto was the manager of the Conversational Interaction Technology department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Before that, he led the Natural Dialog R&D group at SpeechWorks International (now Nuance). Earlier, he joined the Speech Research Group at AT&T Bell Labs and later AT&T Shannon Labs. Roberto began his career as a speech scientist with CSELT, the research center of the then Italian operating telephone company, after completing his Dr. Eng. degree from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy. Pieraccini holds several patents and has authored more than 100 publications on the subjects of speech recognition, language modeling, language understanding and dialog.