linguistics
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Joseph E. Aoun
Joseph E. Aoun is the seventh president of Northeastern University and the author of Robot-Proof, the book that named the AI-era reinvention of higher education. A Lebanese-born linguist trained under Noam Chomsky, he has spent nearly two decades turning a single Boston commuter campus into a 13-campus global university system spanning North America and the UK, expanding co-op placements into more than 140 countries and growing external research funding sevenfold.
Lily Clifford
Lily Clifford is the CEO and co-founder of Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI company building enterprise-grade text-to-speech models with a linguistic edge. A Stanford NLP PhD dropout with a background in sociophonetics, she left academia in 2023 to prove that AI voices could sound like a friend rather than a voice actor. Rime now powers over 100 million phone conversations monthly for brands like Domino's and Wingstop, having raised $8.6M in total funding. Her counterintuitive thesis - that slightly 'bored' voices outperform perfectly polished ones - has become the foundation of a fast-growing enterprise voice platform.