Hi! My name is Julian. I live in San Francisco and work as a Senior Research Scientist in the Foundational Research Unit at Google DeepMind (GDM), which I became part of in 2024. Before that, I was in the former Perception team at Google Research for over a year. Before that, I was a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon AWS AI, where I worked for over five years.
At GDM, I work on AI for speech, audio, and dialogue. This includes real-time, interactive multimodal agents via Project Astra, improving audio-native capabilities of large language models such as Google Gemini, as well as research into end-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) and generative audio.
More broadly, my expertise is in deep learning for human language, including work on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-based natural language processing (NLP): making these faster, cheaper, and more accessible for the long tail of low-resource languages and domain-specific uses. While at AWS, I contributed to AI cloud services via production-scale language modeling, speech-to-text adaptation, and fast acoustic architectures. The topics of my publications include:
- Spoken audio generation and synthesis: Spectron · Very Attentive Tacotron
- 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 variously 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.
Contact me@my-domain-name-goes.here!