Hi! My name is Julian. I live in San Francisco and work as a Staff Research Scientist in the Frontier AI unit at Google DeepMind, 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.
My current work centers on streaming audio generation, particularly duplex speech & music interactions:
- Live, audio-native inputs and outputs in Google Gemini and Project Astra,
- Creative music co-creation via Magenta RealTime 2,
- Research on spoken language models and frontier problems in audio synthesis.
though I actively contribute at the intersection of research mathematics and AI, through:
- Intrinsic gradient descent for training models with p-adic parameters,
- Prize-winning contributions to the Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark,
- Early use (Mar. 2025) of LLMs on open problems, in the arithmetic geometry on cubic surfaces.
My broader expertise is in deep learning for human language, i.e., natural language processing (NLP). My published research includes:
- Speech generation and synthesis: SpeechSSM · Spectron · SequenceLayers · Very Attentive Tacotron · Mono-to-Binaural
- Large pretrained language models: Masked LM Scoring · Transformers without Tears · Meta-Learning the Difference
- Speech recognition and self-supervision: Transformer + CTC · Align-Refine · DeCoAR · BERTphone · Attention Failures in ASR
- NLP for low- to zero-resource languages: Unsupervised Translation · Prompt with Phonemes · 0-shot E2E SLU · 0-shot X-lingual Evals.
Before that, I studied pure mathematics and its applications. Via my mentor, my Erdős number is 2.
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. 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!