Etienne Barnard obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989, writing his thesis on “Neural Networks for Scene Analysis”. He has since been active in research and development in pattern recognition and speech processing. He has held several academic positions and has also worked in industry. Barnard has co-authored more than 250 refereed scientific publications on topics including pattern recognition, neural networks, speech recognition and human-computer interaction. He holds several international patents in speech processing and is a former Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Barnard’s research contributions have been recognized in various ways, including Google Research Awards in 2009, 2011 and 2014; he is currently an Extraordinary Professor at the North-West University.