Richard Sproat received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1985. He has worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the University of Illinois, Oregon Health & Science University, and finally at Google, where he is currently a Research Scientist at Google Japan. Sproat has worked in various areas including syntax, morphology, computational morphology, articulatory and acoustic phonetics, text-to-speech synthesis, and text-to-scene conversion. At Google he works on applying Deep Learning to problems in text processing. He also has a long-standing interest in writing systems and symbol systems more generally.