Board of Advisors
THE COMPANY > Advisors
Michael Phillips – Special Advisor
Mike is CoFounder and CTO of vlingo. Mike has been active in the speech technology world for over twenty years. He started his career as a researcher first at Carnegie Mellon University and then at the Spoken Language Systems group at MIT working on core technology for automatic speech recognition. In 1994, he founded SpeechWorks based on technology that he and others had developed at MIT. Over the next ten years, Mike and team grew SpeechWorks from a small startup in a new market into the market leader in the now established market for speech enabled call center solutions. SpeechWorks was responsible for many of key innovations in use today in the speech recognition systems deployed throughout the world. In 2003, SpeechWorks was acquired by ScanSoft (now named Nuance). Mike joined ScanSoft as CTO and oversaw technology integration and development across the product groups. In 2005, Mike left ScanSoft to spend a year as a visiting scientist at MIT before starting vlingo in the summer of 2006.
Jerry L. Archer, CISSP – Special Advisor
Mr. Archer's responsibilities include securing and protecting all of Sallie Mae’s systems and offerings, and for security initiatives across the company. Prior to Sallie Mae, Archer was the Chief Information Security Officer at Intuit and prior to joining Intuit, Archer was managing director at Global Competitive Strategies, LLC. Previously, Mr. Archer was Senior Vice President for Global Interoperability at Visa International and before Visa, at the Fidelity Brokerage Company; he was senior vice president of information security and technical risk. For his work in the U.S. Intelligence Community earned Mr. Archer the National Performance Review Hammer Award, a Distinguished Service Award from the Central Intelligence Agency and a Meritorious Unit Citation from the National Security Agency.
Robert Finch – Special Advisor
Robert Finch is President of Cirpass LLC which advises clients on adoption and integration of broadband wireless technologies. He was previously Vice President, Broadband Spectrum for Sprint Nextel, responsible for all of the combined company’s spectrum acquisition and management activities to support the provision of broadband wireless services by Sprint Nextel. His past experience includes engineering, planning and operations management roles for AT&T Bell Laboratories and MCI WorldCom. He also managed multiple mergers, acquisitions and divestitures for both MCI and CIENA Corporation. Mr. Finch formerly served as an independent director for Nuance Communications, Incorporated (NASDAQ: NUAN), the leading worldwide provider of speech and imaging solutions that are used to automate a wide range of tasks. He serves on the Wireless Communications Association board of directors and executive committee.
