Laurent Amar, Eng.
Co-founder and President
As co-founder and president of VoiceAge Corporation, Laurent Amar is responsible for the vision and overall direction of VoiceAge’s business and for strategic accounts. ...more>>
Sylvain Desjardins, Eng.
Co-founder, Executive Vice President and
Chairman of the Board of Directors
As co-founder and executive vice president of VoiceAge Corporation, Sylvain Desjardins spearheads the company’s overall corporate development, manages the executive team and is responsible for the company’s financial and administrative functions. ...more>>
Richard Romagnino, Eng.
Vice President of Business Development and Sales
As vice president of business development and sales for VoiceAge Corporation, Richard Romagnino is responsible for business development in licensing and codec solutions and for developing new markets for VoiceAge solutions. He also manages the sales team. ...more>>
Redwan Salami, PhD
Co-founder and Vice President of Research and Development
As co-founder and vice president of research and development of VoiceAge Corporation, Dr. Redwan Salami is responsible for the planning, operations and management of VoiceAge’s research and development group. ...more>>
Claude Gravel, Eng.
Vice President of Engineering
As vice president of engineering at VoiceAge Corporation, Claude Gravel is responsible for the technical orientation and overall management of the VoiceAge product line. ...more>>
EXECUTIVE BIOGRAPHIES
Laurent Amar, Eng.
Co-founder and President
As co-founder and president of VoiceAge Corporation, Laurent Amar is responsible for the vision and overall direction of VoiceAge’s business and for strategic accounts.
Mr. Amar has more than 15 years’ experience in the development of successful business models for technology transfer in the telecommunications industry.
In 1994, he founded Sipro Lab Telecom and concluded a licensing agreement with the Université de Sherbrooke to become the exclusive commercial agent for the ACELP® technology. He then positioned the generic ACELP technology in international wireless and telecommunications standards and as a de facto standard for the Internet. Mr. Amar played a key role in the creation of the G.729 Consortium and the “one-stop-shopping” concept for licensing the G.729 speech codec. He also contributed to the ITU-T standardization of G.729A. He continues to hold the position of president at Sipro.
At VoiceAge, Mr. Amar has been instrumental in building consortia for the development, standardization and commercialization of ACELP-based adaptive multi-rate speech and audio coding technologies. He has positioned VoiceAge intellectual property rights in organizations such as Apple, NTT DoCoMo and Nokia; in international wireless and telecommunications standards; and in the very widely deployed RealPlayer®, Windows Media® Player and QuickTime®. Mr. Amar is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, where he shares his keen understanding of the emerging challenges and opportunities in the converging worlds of the Internet, mobile and traditional telecommunications.
Mr. Amar holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the École Polytechnique of Montréal.
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Sylvain Desjardins, Eng.
Co-founder, Executive Vice President and
Chairman of the Board of Directors
As co-founder and executive vice president of VoiceAge Corporation, Sylvain Desjardins spearheads the company’s overall corporate development, manages the executive team and is responsible for the company’s financial and administrative functions.
To these responsibilities Mr. Desjardins brings more than 15 years of broad-based leadership experience in technology transfer, corporate management and financial and business development.
Mr. Desjardins was instrumental in the creation of VoiceAge Corporation as a spin-off of Sipro Lab Telecom, which he had joined in 1998 and where he continues to stay involved as executive vice president. In 2004, Mr. Desjardins was the main instigator in the creation of VoiceAge Networks (now Vantrix) as a spin-off of VoiceAge Corporation. Prior to these activities and starting in 1988, Mr. Desjardins was Director of the Technology Transfer Office for the Université de Sherbrooke, where he supervised the development of the intellectual property and the licensing activities for the ACELP® technology in the telecommunications industry.
Mr. Desjardins holds a BS in Engineering and an MBA from the Université de Sherbrooke.
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Richard Romagnino, Eng.
Vice President of Business Development and Sales
As vice president of business development and sales for VoiceAge Corporation, Richard Romagnino is responsible for business development in licensing and codec solutions and for developing new markets for VoiceAge solutions. He also manages the sales team.
Richard Romagnino has more than 20 years’ experience in the telecommunications industry, during which he has held senior positions in functional areas including Research and Development, Product Management, Marketing, Business Development and Business Management. Prior to joining VoiceAge, Mr. Romagnino was a senior member of Nortel Networks’ Optical business unit, where he helped define and develop core optical infrastructure, peripheral and OEM products. He was also the Optical business unit prime for mergers and acquisitions and partner negotiations. Earlier at Nortel, he was responsible for the complete Broadband Video Networks portfolio and implemented several comprehensive system-level solutions.
Mr. Romagnino often represents VoiceAge at industry conferences and events, where he speaks on the technology and benefits of hi-fi speech and audio coding.
Mr. Romagnino graduated with Honors from McGill University with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Management.
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Redwan Salami, PhD
Co-founder and Vice President of Research and Development
As co-founder and vice president of research and development of VoiceAge Corporation, Dr. Redwan Salami is responsible for the planning, operations and management of VoiceAge’s research and development group. He is also the company’s main representative on the technical committees of international standardization bodies, specifically within Study Group 16 of the
ITU-T.
One of the key inventors of the ACELP® technology platform, Dr. Salami has authored or co-authored numerous patents, articles and conference papers in the field of speech coding. For nine years prior to co-founding VoiceAge in 1999, Dr. Salami was a senior researcher and adjunct professor with the Speech and Audio Research Group at the Université de Sherbrooke, where he was involved in the design and implementation of telephone-band and wideband speech coding algorithms. The results of his research activities are now found in many international and regional speech coding standards as well as in proprietary codecs.
Dr. Salami obtained a BS in Electrical Engineering from Al-Fateh University in Tripoli, Libya, in 1984 and MS and PhD degrees in Electronics from Southampton University in the United Kingdom in 1986 and 1990, respectively.
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Claude Gravel, Eng.
Vice President of Engineering
As vice president of engineering at VoiceAge Corporation, Claude Gravel is responsible for the technical orientation and overall management of the VoiceAge product line.
Claude Gravel has 20 years of technical, project and team management experience in DSP development and implementations, and in speech coding, speech synthesis and speech recognition. In his previous role as director of engineering at VoiceAge, he led the engineering team in many DSP and speech coding and compression projects, including all speech codec implementations. Prior to joining VoiceAge, Mr. Gravel held technical and leadership positions within Bell-Northern Research and Nortel Networks research teams, where he made key contributions to numerous DSP projects and managed local, multi-site and international projects focused on the design and architecture of software implementations.
Mr. Gravel holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the École Polytechnique of Montréal.
