Education and Early Career
Payette was born in Montreal, Quebec. She attended elementary and secondary schools in Montreal. In 1982 she completed an International Baccalaureate Diploma at the United World College of the Atlantic in South Wales, UK. Later she received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering cum laude from McGill University in 1986 and a Master of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1990.
Between 1986 and 1988, Payette worked as a systems engineer for IBM Canada's Science Engineering division. From 1988 to 1990, as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, she was involved in a high-performance computer architecture project and worked as a teaching assistant. At the beginning of 1991, Payette joined the Communications and science department of the IBM Research Laboratory in Zürich, Switzerland, for a one year visiting scientist appointment. When she returned to Canada, in January 1992, she joined the Speech Research Group of Bell-Northern Research in Montreal where she was responsible for a project in telephone speech understanding using computer voice recognition.
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