Introduction

Dr. Braga is the co-founder and president of DefinedCrowd Corp., a startup headquartered in Settle, WA, and with an R&D center in Lisbon, Portugal, that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to provide big data to speech technology and natural language processing applications. With fifteen years working in Speech Technology both in academia and industry in Portugal, Spain, China and the US, Dr. Braga has deep expertise in Speech Science and has successfully introduced Crowdsourcing as a salable big data solution in Speech at Microsoft and recently in Voicebox Technologies. Her effort has resulted in reducing data collection and processing costs by 80%, by taking quality control to 98% of accuracy and by speeding up the language expansion roadmap in 50%. Dr. Braga is a guest lecturer on Crowdsourcing at the University of Washington, USA has several patents mainly in crowdsourcing for Speech Technology, sits on the scientific committees of the main conferences in the field and is the author of more than 80 scientific papers.