The ACL sadly received the message about the unexpected passing away of Professor Fred Jelinek, on Tuesday night. Fred was one of the pioneers and founders of modern research in speech recognition and statistical machine translation and made enormous contributions to our field. In recognition of his contributions he received the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. His death is a great loss for all those who knew him, and for the ACL community.

Here is a link to Fred's life and work in his own words:clsp.jhu.edu

Sincerely,
Ido Dagan
President of the ACL