Matthias Wölfel will finish his Ph.D on far-field speech recognition in the middle of 2007. He has given seminars in Speech and Robust Speech Recognition and has published more than 25 papers in this field. He has been involved in two European research projects on distant speech recognition: FAME and CHIL. He has written extensive sections of source code of speech enhancement, spectral estimation and feature extraction for automatic recognition, and has participated in NIST Rich Transcription evaluations with focus on far-field speech. 

John McDonough holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Johns Hopkins Univerity. He has taught the courses Man-Machine Communication and Microphone Arrays: Gateway to Hands Free Automatic Speech Recognition at the University of Karlsruhe for five years. He has published dozens of conference and journal articles, and written complete software toolkits for source localization, beamforming and automatic speech recognition.