Dear colleagues and friends,
亲爱的同事和朋友们，
We announce with a heavy heart that one of my former graduate students, Yajie Miao, has died tragically. Yajie was awarded the PhD degree from Carnegie Mellon University in August 2016, immediately after he defended his thesis on “Incorporating Context Information into Deep Neural Network Acoustic Models”. He had accepted a position at Microsoft in Redmond (in Jinyu Li’s team), and was set to start work there in October 2016. Unfortunately, he died tragically, while visiting his family in China, before he was able to do so.
我们怀着沉痛的心情宣布一个我以前的毕业生，苗亚杰已经去世。2016年8月Carnegie Mellon大学在亚杰完成了他的论文答辩后授予了他博士学位。他已经接受了在Redmond的微软的一个职位（Jinyu Li的团队），预计2016年10月开始工作。不幸的是，在他去工作之前因为探望在中国的家人而去世了。
Even though Yajie had only been active in the speech field for about five years, he was very well known and his papers have already been cited more than 500 times, which is an outstanding achievement for a graduate student. His ASRU 2015 paper “EESEN: End-to-end speech recognition using deep RNN models and WFST-based decoding” was a best paper candidate. Our ICASSP 2016 paper on Visual Features for Context Aware Speech Recognition was based heavily on his ideas and contributions, and was a best student paper candidate.
尽管亚杰在语音领域只活跃了5年，他已经有非常高的知名度并且他的文章被引用了超过500次，这对于毕业生来说是个非常杰出的成就。他的ASRU 2015年文章“EESEN: End-to-end speech recognition using deep RNN models and WFST-based decoding”是个最好的候选。我们的ICASSP 2016文章“Visual Features for Context Aware Speech Recognition”是最好的学生论文候选，大部分都是基于在他的观点和成果。
He could not present his most recent Interspeech paper himself for visa reasons, but he was a member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and news of his passing have triggered many researchers to reach out to CMU or Microsoft, in order to express their condolences. We collected these, and forwarded them to his family, along with other memories of Yajie’s time in the US and artifacts of his work. Yajie contributed a chapter to an upcoming book (S. Watanabe, M. Delcroix, F. Metze, and J. R. Hershey, eds., New Era for Robust Speech Recognition – Exploiting Deep Learning. Springer, 2017), which will receive a dedication to Yajie.
因为签证原因他最近的Interspeech论文没能发表，但是他作为ISCA的成员，他过去的事迹吸引了许多研究人员向CMU和微软表达了他们的哀悼。我们收集了这些并连同他在美国的其他回忆和工作成果一起发给了他的家人。有一本即将出版的书（S. Watanabe, M. Delcroix, F. Metze, and J. R. Hershey, eds., New Era for Robust Speech Recognition – Exploiting Deep Learning. Springer, 2017）包含着亚杰的奉献，其中一章就有他的贡献。
I am sure all of you who knew him will remember Yajie as fondly as we do. He was an exceptional friend and colleague, who impressed not just with what he did, but especially with how he did it. With his kind nature, he was always ready to help and had immediately endeared him to anybody; any minute spent with Yajie was a minute spent with a “real Mensch”. We can only imagine that his family and friends must have adored him for those same qualities, and miss his relaxed personality and self-confident friendliness. We miss chatting and discussing with him easily during the last few months, but it is almost impossible to accept that his friends and family got to meet him as a PhD for just a few short days.
我很确定你们每个认识亚杰的人都会像我们一样永远记得他。他是个杰出的朋友以及同事，他令人印象深刻的不仅是因为他做了什么，而是他怎么做的。他有着善良的天性，总是时刻愿意帮助他人并令人喜爱。与亚杰共度的每一分钟都让人觉得他是个“真正的好人”。我们只能想象他的家人和朋友一定也因此喜爱他并怀念他的随和，他的自信友好。我们怀念可以和他随意交谈讨论的最后几个月，而他的家人和朋友只能和作为博士的他相处很短的时间，这是最让人难以接受的。
We conclude by reminding us all to cherish life and our loved ones above all else.
最后，我们提醒大家珍惜生命和我们所爱的人。
To honor Yajie's work and remember him, Jinyu Li (Microsoft) and Florian Metze (CMU) set up this fundraiser for the Yajie Miao Memorial Student Travel Fund, which supports promising graduate students’ travels to those speech conferences that Yajie had also attended. Students can apply to this fund by applying for ISCA student travel grants, which are awarded for Interspeech, or other speech conferences every year. Depending on the availability of funds, one or more recipients will be selected by ISCA and the organizers, and recognized together with other grants and awards at the conference. Any and all proceeds from this fundraiser will go towards student travel, administered by ISCA.
为了纪念亚杰，并尊重他的成果，Jinyu Li（微软）和Florian Metze（CMU）设立了支持有前途的毕业生去那些亚杰去过的语音会议的旅行的“苗亚杰纪念学生旅行基金”。学生可以通过申请由Interspeech或者其他语音会议每年赞助的ISCA学生旅行补助金来申请这个基金。根据基金的可用情况，ISCA和组织者会筛选出一个或多个受助人，并和别的补助金和奖金作为参考一起认证。任何这个基金的筹款人的收益将会用于ISCA管理的学生旅行。
In fond memory of Dr. Yajie Miao- Florian Metze and Yajie's colleagues and friends at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft, and throughout the speech recognition research community.
对苗亚杰美好的回忆——Florian Metze，亚杰在CMU的同事和朋友以及整个语音识别研究领域