About Me

See Also: Publications

I’m an ex-Alien, ex-Amazon, ex-CMU, ex-IIITA scientist and software engineer based in the Bangalore area, who dabbles (or is sometimes immersed) in puns, photography, ayurveda, music, and other transient hobbies.

I’m the proprietor of Brruwee Labs, a consulting firm in India and work for Cobalt Speech on several very exciting speech and language projects. I also spend some of my spare time volunteering to help the visually disabled using text-to-speech technologies.

ex-Alien: I lived in the US for a little over seven years and always found it amusing to be known as an alien. While in the US, I held the F-1 (student) visa, the OPT status, and the H-1B (work) visa. I had a permanent job with an employer who was anticipating making an EB1/EB2 greencard application on my behalf. Before all that happened though, one morning I decided to stop being the alien, quit my job and returned to India. I still travel to the US once in a while on a business/tourist visa, and when I do, I try my best to eat the veggie burrito bowl at Chipotle at least once.

ex-Amazon: From Nov 2013 to Nov 2014, I was a machine learning scientist in Amazon’s speech group in Boston and worked on technologies that power its products like the Echo, the Dash, the Fire TV and the Mobile Shopping App. I am an author on two pending US patents submitted by Amazon. One of them is about pronunciation modeling in speech recognition. The other is about active learning for lexical annotations.

ex-CMU: I received my PhD and Masters degrees from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. My doctoral thesis, advised by Dr. Alan W Black was on style-specific phrasing in speech synthesis. As a Masters student, I worked with Dr. Alon Lavie and Dr. Stephan Vogel on statistical machine translation. While at CMU, I contributed to several large projects, such as: GALE, TRANSTAC, and PT-STAR. I also made large code contributions to the Festvox, Festival and Flite tools.

ex-IIITA: I received my bachelors degree in Information Technology with honors (and a gold medal) from IIITA. I helped establish and have been a member of the INDEM team of student volunteers who sysadmin’ed the university network.