Dr Julie Vonwiller - Director

Dr Julie Vonwiller has been working in the field of speech science and technology for more than 20 years. Since founding Appen in 1996, Julie has overseen its development into a world-leading products and services organisation for speech and language technology products and services. Her direct involvement in complex linguistic and computational linguistic tasks in over 30 languages has provided the drive for Appen's innovative and cutting-edge speech and language technology solutions.

Prior to founding Appen, Julie was Research Manager for the Speech Technology Research Group in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney and a Project Manager of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL), a major Australian Government-funded study covering all current variants of spoken English in Australia.

Julie has a successful record in project management of software-oriented projects, commercialising R&D, managing multi-disciplinary research and development teams and in-depth familiarity with leading edge speech and language technology techniques. In 2007, Julie was given an “Innovation Hero” award by the <Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering> at the University of Sydney for her work with Appen and in 2008 received the Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from Macquarie University.

Julie has a Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) majoring in Linguistics, and a PhD degree awarded by Macquarie University.