Hi! My name is Julian. I live in San Francisco and work as a Senior Research Scientist on the Perception team at Google Research, which I joined in 2023. Before that, I was a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon AWS AI, where I worked for over five years.
At Google, I currently work on AI for speech, audio, and dialogue generation. However, my focus is more broadly on deep learning for human language. At AWS, this was on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP): making these faster, cheaper, and more accessible for the long tail of low-resource languages and domain-specific uses. I contributed to AI cloud services via production-scale language modeling, speech-to-text adaptation, and fast acoustic architectures. My publications center on
- Spoken language generation: Spectron
- Large pretrained language models: Masked LM Scoring · Unsupervised Bitext + NMT · Meta-Learning the Difference
- Non-autoregressive end-to-end ASR: Self-Attention + CTC · Align-Refine
- Low-resource language understanding: Transformers without Tears · Zero-Shot X-lingual Evals · Zero-Shot E2E SLU
- Representation learning for speech audio: BERTphone · DeCoAR
though I’m always interested in pure mathematics and its applications. My Erdős number is 2.
I graduated from Harvard with an honors degree in Mathematics and a secondary in Computer Science, during which I held summer research fellowships (U.Chicago; Cambridge), took a leave and worked as a full-time mobile developer (Top Hat), was a teaching fellow (CS50) and course assistant (Differential Topology; Galois Theory), held paid internships (J.P.Morgan S&T; HubSpot), and directed a non-audition show choir.
I hail from the Philippines and from Canada.
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