David is the CTO of Pryon, leading the development of the industry’s most accurate AI platform to help people work smarter and solve problems faster by transforming digital information and human knowledge into a natural language interactive digital experience. Prior to joining Pryon in 2017, David spent 35 years at IBM Research, developing statistical machine learning techniques for improving speech recognition, natural language processing and conversational systems. A member of IBM Academy of Technology, an IBM Fellow, Head of Human Language Technologies, Speech CTO, and Chief Scientist for Conversational Systems at IBM Research, David led award-winning IBM teams for three decades.

During the years, first as the interim General Manager and then as the Core Team Member of IBM Speech Business Unit, David was also responsible for delivering speech technologies to IBM Divisions, resulting into more than 10 speech products for desktop, embedded, and telephony platforms. For their pioneering work, David and his team received the IBM Research Extraordinary Accomplishment Award for Speech Technologies in 2010. Starting in 2012, David became an active technical lead at IBM in Cognitive Computing, shaping the company’s direction in Conversational Systems and driving the research and development for IBM Watson Conversation Products. David holds more than 85 patents.

David is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). David received the IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award in 2001, and in 2009 he and his team received the IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition Award for "long-term commitment to pioneering research and innovative development in speech recognition." In 2017, David received the Purdue University Electrical & Computer Engineering Outstanding Alumni Award. In 2021, David received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, “For contributions to and leadership in research and deployment of spoken language technologies.”

David received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1982, a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tehran University in 1970, and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Imperial College of London in 1976.