Robert MacAuslan, Chief Executive Officer
is a statistician and social scientist with extensive experience in ESL instruction. He has worked for over a decade teaching English pronunciation, reading and composition both in the US and abroad. Robert has been responsible for overseeing and performing complex statistical analysis on large data-sets for STAR over the past ten years. Robert is the founder of Phonologics and prior to becoming CEO headed up the APST pilot studies at various non-profit and academic institutions for Phonologics.
Linda Ferrier, Chief Linguistics Officer
Chief Linguistics Officer, Linda Ferrier, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at Northeastern University, Boston, where she was chair from 2000-2007. Her work focused on the use of computer technology for people with a variety of communication impairments. Over 15 years she developed and directed a program to provide accent modification to faculty and international teaching assistants. She developed two programs for screening and improving the accents of Non Native Speakers of English: Speech Works, the Accent Modification Tool and the Speech Works Pronunciation Screening Test. She is author of two software patents. Prof. Ferrier has worked with STAR on a series of speech analysis projects. Her company, ViaSpeech, provides computer-assisted intelligibility training to foreign-born professionals in the Sarasota, FL area.
Joel MacAuslan, Chief Technology Officer
Chief Technology Officer, Joel MacAuslan, Ph.D., is the founder (in 1995), chief executive, and chief scientist of Speech Technology and Applied Research Corp. (STAR), which developed the Phonologics scoring engine. Dr. MacAuslan has worked for over 30 years in mathematical analysis and algorithm development, particularly for digital image and signal processing. He developed the knowledge-based and other speech-processing methods and algorithms that underlie the Phonologics speech analysis techniques, as well as most of STAR’s proprietary software library of processing functions, including those for analysis of speech acoustics. In addition, he performed the statistical analyses that underlie the Phonologics engine’s critical correlations, those between the listeners’ intelligibility judgments and the algorithmic measurements of speech.
Rita MacAuslan, Director, Customer Relations
Rita MacAuslan, Ph.D., has extensive education and experience in ESL and linguistics. She brings over 40 years’ experience in teaching ESL and English, along with over 30 years of technical writing and editing to Phonologics. She has taught at all levels of the education system, from primary school through graduate school, along with working in the defense, health-care, finance, and technology sectors. Most recently Rita has been working with APST customers in both the academic and commercial venues, while continuing to teach English, ESL, and related subjects as an Adjunct Professor at both the community college and university levels.
Yong-Chao Xu, Director, East Asian Markets
Yong-Chao Xu, M.A., M.S., has extensive experience working for international firms in both China and the U.S. Her advanced degrees include language, design, and accounting. Most recently she has been working with potential APST customers and investors in China.
Sean Sullivan, Director of Public Relations
is an entrepreneur who has helped found a wide range of successful businesses, including Telepharmacy Solutions, a drug distribution technology company sold to AmerisourceBergen, and Sullivan & Mulvaney, a high tech marketing agency sold to Earle Palmer Brown. Sean spent 10 years with IBM in marketing and was Vice President of Marketing for public software and hardware companies before starting his own agency. He originally was a journalist on the east and west coasts, including The Wall Street Journal. He also spent five years in Africa with the Peace Corps. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and has a Master’s degree from Fairfield University. He lives in Darien, Connecticut.