In 1990, he became a Research Associate in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University. From 1995 to 1996, he was a Visiting Researcher at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Currently, he is a Professor in the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies and an Affiliated Professor in the School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He has also been an Invited Researcher at ATR and NICT.

He has published more than 200 technical papers on speech recognition, spoken language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. He has been conducting several speech-related projects in Japan including a free large vocabulary continuous speech recognition software project (http://julius.sourceforge.jp/) and the automatic transcription system for the Japanese Parliament (Diet).

Dr. Kawahara received the 1997 Awaya Memorial Award from the Acoustical Society of Japan and the 2000 Sakai Memorial Award from the Information Processing Society of Japan. From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee. From 2011, he is a secretary of IEEE SPS Japan Chapter. He was a general chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition \& Understanding workshop (ASRU 2007). He also served as a tutorial chair of INTERSPEECH 2010. He is a senior member of IEEE.