Hans Peter Graf is Department Head at NEC Laboratories America, supporting the machine learning research group. His responsibilities include technology transfer to business units and the commercialization of research results. His technical interests focus on problems of large-scale learning and the application of machine learning to the development of cognitive systems.

Before joining NEC Laboratories, Hans Peter was with Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories from 1983 until 2003 - working on neural net models, designing micro-electronic processors and building vision systems for industrial applications. Massively parallel neural net processors of his design were key parts in high-speed address readers and check processing systems. The image recognition work expanded to face analysis and lip reading and led to the development of video-realistic talking heads for interactive web services.

Hans Peter received a Diploma in physics in 1976 and a PhD in physics in 1981, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He published over 100 articles and has more than 20 patents issued. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the American Physical Society; he received the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff award at Bell Laboratories.