He co-founded the Signal, Speech, and Language Interpretation Laboratory at the University. He received a masters degree from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Jeff is the main author and designer of the graphical model toolkit (GMTK), and has done much research on both structure learning of and fast probabilistic inference in dynamic Graphical models. His main research lies in statistical graphical models, speech, language and time series, machine learning, human-computer interaction, combinatorial optimization, and high-performance computing. He was a general co-chair for IEEE ASRU 2003, and HLT/NAACL 2006. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, and ACL, is a 2001 CRA Digital-Government Research Fellow, and is a 2001 recipient of the NSF CAREER award.