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.
At Google DeepMind, I focus on AI models for streaming audio generation, particularly duplex speech and music:
- Live, audio-native inputs and outputs in Google Gemini and Project Astra,
- Creative music co-creation via Lyria RealTime,
- Research on spoken language models and frontier problems in audio synthesis.
I also work part-time on applying and evaluating AI systems for research-level math, through:
- Benchmark contributions to Humanity’s Last Exam,
- Tackling open problems in the arithmetic geometry of cubic surfaces.
My broader expertise is in deep learning for human language, i.e., natural language processing (NLP). Topics of publications include:
- 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 · Prompting 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!