Harold Mills

Harold Mills joined NovaSpeech in August 2006 as Senior Software Engineer, and is currently the lead programmer on the hybrid synthesis project. He has more than twenty years of experience in signal processing and software and hardware development in the areas of animal bioacoustics, speech analysis and synthesis, planetary image processing, and satellite communications.

Harold earned B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, respectively, from Cornell University in 1986 and 1988. From 1987 to 1990 he worked at TRW in Redondo Beach, California, where he participated in software and hardware projects related to space satellite communication systems, including the design and construction of a real-time FFT-based digital spectrum analyzer and a digital interpolation ASIC.

From 1990 until 1994 he worked at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University, where he wrote image processing and display software for NASA’s Mars Observer mission and developed a prototype JPEG image compressor for other missions.

From 1990 to 1993 Harold also consulted for Eloquent Technology, Inc. in Ithaca, NY, writing a software implementation of a Klatt-style speech synthesizer. The synthesizer translated formant-based descriptions of speech to waveforms, and ran in real time on a variety of workstations and personal computers.

In 1994 Harold joined the Bioacoustics Research Program of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where he worked for the next twelve years developing software for collecting and analyzing animal acoustical and other behavioral data. From 1999 through 2005 he was the lead developer of the Raven sound analysis software (www.birds.cornell.edu/raven). During 2000 he led the development, deployment, and operation of the acoustical component of the BirdCast project, a largely automated network of acoustical bird migration monitoring stations that operated in the Delaware River valley during the spring and fall migrations.