Dear colleagues and friends,
親愛的同事和朋友們，
We announce with a heavy heart that one of my former graduate students, Yajie Miao, has died tragically. Yajie was awarded the PhD degree from Carnegie Mellon University in August 2016, immediately after he defended his thesis on “Incorporating Context Information into Deep Neural Network Acoustic Models”. He had accepted a position at Microsoft in Redmond (in Jinyu Li’s team), and was set to start work there in October 2016. Unfortunately, he died tragically, while visiting his family in China, before he was able to do so.
我們懷着沉痛的心情宣布一個我以前的畢業生，苗亞傑已經去世。2016年8月Carnegie Mellon大學在亞傑完成了他的論文答辯後授予了他博士學位。他已經接受了在Redmond的微軟的一個職位（Jinyu Li的團隊），預計2016年10月開始工作。不幸的是，在他去工作之前因為探望在中國的家人而去世了。
Even though Yajie had only been active in the speech field for about five years, he was very well known and his papers have already been cited more than 500 times, which is an outstanding achievement for a graduate student. His ASRU 2015 paper “EESEN: End-to-end speech recognition using deep RNN models and WFST-based decoding” was a best paper candidate. Our ICASSP 2016 paper on Visual Features for Context Aware Speech Recognition was based heavily on his ideas and contributions, and was a best student paper candidate.
盡管亞傑在語音領域隻活躍了5年，他已經有非常高的知名度并且他的文章被引用了超過500次，這對于畢業生來說是個非常傑出的成就。他的ASRU 2015年文章“EESEN: End-to-end speech recognition using deep RNN models and WFST-based decoding”是個最好的候選。我們的ICASSP 2016文章“Visual Features for Context Aware Speech Recognition”是最好的學生論文候選，大部分都是基于在他的觀點和成果。
He could not present his most recent Interspeech paper himself for visa reasons, but he was a member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and news of his passing have triggered many researchers to reach out to CMU or Microsoft, in order to express their condolences. We collected these, and forwarded them to his family, along with other memories of Yajie’s time in the US and artifacts of his work. Yajie contributed a chapter to an upcoming book (S. Watanabe, M. Delcroix, F. Metze, and J. R. Hershey, eds., New Era for Robust Speech Recognition – Exploiting Deep Learning. Springer, 2017), which will receive a dedication to Yajie.
因為簽證原因他最近的Interspeech論文沒能發表，但是他作為ISCA的成員，他過去的事迹吸引了許多研究人員向CMU和微軟表達了他們的哀悼。我們收集了這些并連同他在美國的其他回憶和工作成果一起發給了他的家人。有一本即将出版的書（S. Watanabe, M. Delcroix, F. Metze, and J. R. Hershey, eds., New Era for Robust Speech Recognition – Exploiting Deep Learning. Springer, 2017）包含着亞傑的奉獻，其中一章就有他的貢獻。
I am sure all of you who knew him will remember Yajie as fondly as we do. He was an exceptional friend and colleague, who impressed not just with what he did, but especially with how he did it. With his kind nature, he was always ready to help and had immediately endeared him to anybody; any minute spent with Yajie was a minute spent with a “real Mensch”. We can only imagine that his family and friends must have adored him for those same qualities, and miss his relaxed personality and self-confident friendliness. We miss chatting and discussing with him easily during the last few months, but it is almost impossible to accept that his friends and family got to meet him as a PhD for just a few short days.
我很确定你們每個認識亞傑的人都會像我們一樣永遠記得他。他是個傑出的朋友以及同事，他令人印象深刻的不僅是因為他做了什麼，而是他怎麼做的。他有着善良的天性，總是時刻願意幫助他人并令人喜愛。與亞傑共度的每一分鐘都讓人覺得他是個“真正的好人”。我們隻能想象他的家人和朋友一定也因此喜愛他并懷念他的随和，他的自信友好。我們懷念可以和他随意交談讨論的最後幾個月，而他的家人和朋友隻能和作為博士的他相處很短的時間，這是最讓人難以接受的。
We conclude by reminding us all to cherish life and our loved ones above all else.
最後，我們提醒大家珍惜生命和我們所愛的人。
To honor Yajie's work and remember him, Jinyu Li (Microsoft) and Florian Metze (CMU) set up this fundraiser for the Yajie Miao Memorial Student Travel Fund, which supports promising graduate students’ travels to those speech conferences that Yajie had also attended. Students can apply to this fund by applying for ISCA student travel grants, which are awarded for Interspeech, or other speech conferences every year. Depending on the availability of funds, one or more recipients will be selected by ISCA and the organizers, and recognized together with other grants and awards at the conference. Any and all proceeds from this fundraiser will go towards student travel, administered by ISCA.
為了紀念亞傑，并尊重他的成果，Jinyu Li（微軟）和Florian Metze（CMU）設立了支持有前途的畢業生去那些亞傑去過的語音會議的旅行的“苗亞傑紀念學生旅行基金”。學生可以通過申請由Interspeech或者其他語音會議每年贊助的ISCA學生旅行補助金來申請這個基金。根據基金的可用情況，ISCA和組織者會篩選出一個或多個受助人，并和别的補助金和獎金作為參考一起認證。任何這個基金的籌款人的收益将會用于ISCA管理的學生旅行。
In fond memory of Dr. Yajie Miao- Florian Metze and Yajie's colleagues and friends at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft, and throughout the speech recognition research community.
對苗亞傑美好的回憶——Florian Metze，亞傑在CMU的同事和朋友以及整個語音識别研究領域