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 joined in 2024 after over a year in the former Perception team at Google Research. 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 developing live audio-native input and output support in Google Gemini, enabling interactive multimodal assistants via Project Astra, as well as research into spoken language models and new challenges in speech synthesis. At AWS, I contributed to AI cloud services via both production-scale and custom language models, building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, and fast acoustic architectures.
Overall, my interest is in deep learning for human language, i.e., natural language processing (NLP). My external-facing research includes:
- Speech generation and synthesis: SpeechSSM · Spectron · Very Attentive Tacotron · Mono-to-Binaural
- Large pretrained language models: Masked LM Scoring · Unsupervised Bitext + NMT · Meta-Learning the Difference
- Non-autoregressive end-to-end ASR: Transformer + CTC · Align-Refine
- Low-resource language understanding: Transformers without Tears · Zero-Shot X-lingual Evals · Zero-Shot E2E SLU
- Self-supervised learning (SSL) for speech: DeCoAR · BERTphone
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!