Etienne Barnard obtained his Ph. D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989, writing his thesis on “Neural Networks for Scene Analysis”. He has since then been active in research and development in pattern recognition and speech processing. He has held a number of 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 a number of international patents in speech processing and is a past 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 Research Professor at the North-West University.