A method is disclosed herein that includes an act of causing a processor to access a deep-structured, layered or hierarchical model, called deep convex network, retained in a computer-readable medium, wherein the deep-structured model comprises a plurality of layers with weights assigned thereto. This layered model can produce the output serving as the scores to combine with transition probabilities between states in a hidden Markov model and language model scores to form a full speech recognizer. The method makes joint use of nonlinear random projections and RBM weights, and it stacks a lower module's output with the raw data to establish its immediately higher module. Batch-based, convex optimization is performed to learn a portion of the deep convex network's weights, rendering it appropriate for parallel computation to accomplish the training. The method can further include the act of jointly substantially optimizing the weights, the transition probabilities, and the language model scores of the deep-structured model using the optimization criterion based on a sequence rather than a set of unrelated frames.