Jont Allen

Allen Makes Successful Transition to Academia

After spending 32 years working on speech, hearing, and signal processing issues at what was then known as Bell Labs, Jont Allen left his comfortable position in the business world to join the University of Illinois and the Beckman Institute. His decision was based partly on professional reasons, but was also heavily influenced by a desire to mentor and interact with those who could benefit from the knowledge he had gained from more than three decades of doing research.

“It was an easygoing life because I could do whatever I wanted to do,” Allen said of his time at Bell, later known as AT&T Labs. “But it was much less rewarding because I didn’t teach and I didn’t have students.”

Allen joined Illinois in 2003 having never taught a college course and with no funding or research group to continue his work.

“When I came here, I had never taught, especially undergraduates,” he said. “It was pretty stressful to teach the first couple of undergraduate courses and I am understating stressful. Then I slowly got the funding and built up the research group and now it’s not so stressful. As a matter of fact, it’s very rewarding.”

Allen is an Associate Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois and a full-time faculty member in Beckman’s Artificial Intelligence group. His Human Speech Recognition research group has five Ph.D. candidates, and a few more graduate students who study issues in biomedical imaging, bioengineering, and acoustics.

Much of their research follows on work Allen did at Bell Labs, including topics such as mathematical modeling of cochlear functioning, human speech recognition, speech processing for hearing aids, and many other issues. Allen is still focusing on many of the same research areas he did at Bell, but finding more satisfaction with the process.   

“I love teaching and I love having the interaction with the students,” Allen said. “It’s very rewarding. A good student, you start off teaching them and after they’ve been doing the research for awhile, they teach you. I really like it when a student goes beyond me on a particular topic and they start informing me instead of the other way around. That’s when you know you’ve hit paydirt.”

Allen earned his undergraduate degree from Illinois and his master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He then went to work for Bell Labs, spending 32 years in its renowned acoustic research department that also featured future Beckman colleagues such as Stephen Levinson.

Allen has built an impressive professional resume during his time spent in the business and academic worlds. He is the recipient of the IBM Faculty Award and the IEEE Third Millennium Award and is a Fellow of IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America.

Allen maintains a broad and substantial research line. One five-year project involves a collaboration with Speech and Hearing Science faculty member Cynthia Johnson looking at a possible correlation between children’s hearing problems and their later difficulties in learning how to read. The researchers have been collecting data from elementary age students at a not-for-profit learning center called the Reading Group.