About Raimo: Raimo was born in Estonia before the Second World War. He lived through Nazi occupation and Stalin, eventually fleeing to the United States with his family in his teenage years, and settling down in Sterling, Kansas.

Listen to Raimo's fascinating journey from Estonia through Poland and eastern Germany to a UN refugee camp, and ultimately to the US. He was part of the very first group of researchers to open up the Yorktown Heights lab back in 1961, where he was part of a pioneering team working on automatic speech recognition - what was believed to be a crazy idea back in the day.

Raimo is known for the development of the "Bakis Model" for speech recognition. In its day, the Bakis Model was a revolutionary concept for modeling entire words rather than discrete sounds. Today, speech recognition systems are glorified Bakis Models, with orders-of-magnitude greater numbers of parameters. 

Things to listen for:

• [00:04 - 00:24] Introductionn
• [00:37 - 03:26] Raimo shares what it was like being born in Estonia before WW2
• [07:03 - 10:23] The beginning of Raimo at IBM
• [10:50 - 13:24] The Markov Model
• [13:34 - 17:31] How science has changed, from Raimos' perspective
• [17:52 - 25:01] Does quantum mechanics and fundamental uncertainty help explain consciousness at all?
• [27:35 - 28:26] A memorable mistake