Homayoon Beigi is a Professor of Professional Practice in the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering departments at Columbia University, and heads research and development at Recognition Technologies, Inc. He earned his Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate from Columbia in 1984, 1985, and 1991. He is the author of the first and only comprehensive textbook on Speaker Recognition, a 1000+ page work downloaded over 100,000 times and named by Book Authority among the top 100 Computer Science books of all time. For over three and a half decades, his research has spanned learning-adaptive control, neural network learning, biometrics, pattern recognition, and the recognition of speech, speakers, faces, objects, emotion and language. He developed the award-winning RecoMadeEasy® Recognition Engine and the multiple-award-winning CommerceMadeEasy® software. At Columbia, since 1995, he has taught speaker, speech, handwriting, and signal recognition and control theory across the EE, ME and CS departments, and has advised PhD students and postdocs in Civil Engineering. In 2023, he was one of only 11 finalists for the 5 Presidential Awards for Outstanding Teaching across all Columbia faculty. He has led research at Recognition Technologies, Inc. since 2003. From 1991 to 2001, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, working on speaker and speech recognition, natural language processing, online handwriting recognition, search, control, and neural network learning.