Gibbon participated in the European Speech Assessment Methods (SAM) project and was involved in development of the SAMPA Alphabet in this project, and in the European EAGLES projects. As part of these projects he was lead editor of two handbooks on standards and evaluation of speech technology systems (1997, 2000). In the international Verbmobil project for speech-to-speech translation, he was the lexicographic coordinator for the development of an inheritance lexicon, supporting speaker independent automatic translation from German to English and Japanese. He became Convenor of the international COCOSDA group (International Coordinating Committee for Speech Databases and Assessment) from 2006 until 2014. He has published mainly in the areas of computational phonology, prosody, and lexicography. He has researched English, German, Welsh, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Yacouba, and Baule (Ivory Coast), Tem (Togo),  Igbo,  and Ibibio (Nigeria), Kuki-Thadou (India) and Mandarin (China), and is particularly concerned about endangered languages. On 10 March 2010, Gibbon was selected as Linguist of the Day on the Linguist List and then again on 27 March 2018 as Featured Linguist. His Erdős number is 4, with the lineage Erdős – Tarski – Maddux – Ladkin – Gibbon, and his current h-index is 23. Gibbon has received various awards including the following: