Thomas Hain is Professor for Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. He holds the degree `Dipl.-Ing' in Electrical and Communication Engineering from the University of Technology, Vienna, and a PhD in Information Engineering from Cambridge University (2002). During undergraduate studies he received a scholarship to conduct parts of his studies at RWTH Aachen, Germany. After receiving a first class degree from the University of Technology Vienna (top 5%) he worked at Philips Speech Processing, Vienna where he left as Senior Technologist in 1997 to joined the Cambridge University Engineering Department as a PhD student and unusually, Research Associate at the same time. Shortly before graduating as PhD student he was appointed to Lecturer at Cambridge University in 2001. Prof Hain moved to Sheffield University in 2004 to become a member of the Speech and Hearing Research Group (SpandH). After a series of intermediary promotions he was appointed as Full Professor in 2013. Since 2009 He leads the 15-strong subgroup on Machine Intelligence for Natural Interfaces and in 2016 he took the role of Head of SpandH - a group consisting of 7 academics, 10 postdoctoral researchers, and more than 30 PhD students. In 2016 Prof Hain also became a member of the Machine Learning Research group.

He has more than 170 publications on Machine Learning and speech recognition topics (Google citations 9.5k, h-index 33). In addition to membership of many technical committees, including repeated positions of area chair at ICASSP, Interspeech, and ICPR, and he as been organising committee member of Interspeech 2009, IEEE ASRU 2011 and 2013. He is also one of the key organisers and designated technical chair of Interspeech 2019. He was as Assoc. Editor of ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and is currently a member of the editorial board of Computer Speech & Language. He also currently serves as Area Chair for Speech and Language technology at ICASSP 2017 and was elected to the IEEE Speech Technical Committee in second term.

Prof. Hain has been an investigator on more than 20 projects, funded by FP6, FP7, EPSRC, DARPA, and industry, with a cumulative research budget of £ 9M (?4M as PI). Until recently he served as PI at Sheffield for the EPSRC programme grant NST (total budget £ 6.2M, Sheffield £ 2.2M), and currently works on industrial projects from Google, dstl, and ITSLanguage. Current projects include MAUDIE (Innovate UK), Tuto (industry) and BiT(University). Prof. Hain is currently setting up a centre funded by industry that will host an additional 10 researchers in speech and language processing.