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Speech Science Forum - Industry Panel
07 March 2024, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Rana Abu-Zhaya
This panel will host several speakers who have transitioned from academia to industry. Speakers will share their experiences and the lessons they learned throughout their professional careers.
The event will take place online: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/3839771971?pwd=STFGSnArRXdqTUJ4UTJRTTJqQUVGZz09
About the Speakers
Hannes Unterholzner
Machine Learning Engineer at Speechmatics
Hannes Unterholzner is an experienced Machine Learning Engineer with specialisation in speech. He joined speech intelligence company Speechmatics in 2019 where he leads technological initiatives in the Accuracy Team, successfully taking cutting-edge models from concept to production that make a real-world impact. Hannes holds a masters degree in Information and Computer Engineering from Graz University of Technology and is dedicated to staying at the forefront of technology, pushing the boundaries of speech recognition, and making it accessible to everyone.
Tim Schoof
Research Scientist at Advanced Bionics
Tim Schoof is a Research Scientist at Advanced Bionics, in California, where she works on telehealth solutions for cochlear implant care. She obtained her PhD in Speech and Hearing Sciences in 2014 at UCL and moved to industry after five years of postdoc. Tim's first industry job was in a clinical research team at a hearing aid company.
Christopher Stewart
Research Associate at Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis
Christopher Stewart earned a Ph.D. in French Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. He spent 4 years as an Assistant Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Texas-Arlington, then worked at Nuance Communications Text-to-Speech R&D in Belgium for 2 years. After two stints as a Senior Data Scientist, he has worked at Google for 7 years as an Analytical and Computational Linguist in the Ads organization. For the past year, he has held a Research Associate appointment at the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis. He has a forthcoming book on language technologies for non-engineers with MIT Press.
Cong Zhang
Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at Newcastle University
Dr. Cong Zhang is a lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at Newcastle University (UK). She received her DPhil degree from the University of Oxford. Following her DPhil, she worked as a TTS Linguistics Engineer & Linguist at A-Lab, Rokid Inc., where she worked on various tasks for developing a TTS system, and led a project for developing a Singing TTS. After this, Cong returned to academia and worked on an ERC-funded project investigating aspects of English and Greek intonation in speech production. Cong’s research covers various aspects of speech prosody; she is also interested in bridging the gap between linguistics theories and speech technology.
Michèle Pettinato
Senior Data Scientist at Datasparq
Dr. Michèle Pettinato is a Senior Data Scientist for Datasparq, a Data
Science consultancy. Her academic background in Linguistics and Speech
Science has underpinned some of her work in industry, feeding into a
variety of projects in educational and health technology. From those
foundations she has branched out more widely into NLP and building
applications for trend detection, regulatory technology and recently
building tools to help a global healthcare company monitor their
online content quality and production efficiencies.