I am an artificial intelligence engineer and manager, experienced in speech recognition and synthesis, natural language processing, entity and intent extraction, language modelling, acoustic modelling, conversation modelling, deep neural networks, and many other areas related to data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
I have 13 years academic and industry experience working on research projects and client solutions in start-up companies and large corporations. I have an M. Phil in linguistics and a PhD in speech technology from Trinity College Dublin, as well as a B.Sc. in Physics and Astronomy from NUI Galway. I have contributed to many academic publications and grants, including a H2020 SME grant worth €1.5m and a DTIF grant worth €6.9m. I hold a patent in the area of semantic parsing.
I’m currently Director of Speech Technology at Soapbox Labs where I direct the research of speech recognition engineers, software engineers, computational linguists, and scientists. As a Fulbright-TechImpact Scholar, I will visit the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I will collaborate on the TalkBack platform, a natural language processing tool designed to help K-12 teachers engage their students in academically productive discourse.
CARNIVAL will focus on incorporating child speech recognition into the TalkBack platform, to allow for the accurate identification of “talk moves” or specific conversational exchanges in classroom environments. CARNIVAL will be especially impactful in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, where social contextualisation has shown to increase students’ understanding and test scores, in particular for girls, and other demographics currently in the minority in STEM. Encouraging these students to choose STEM career paths can result in a positive societal effect, injecting much-needed diversity into increasingly homogeneous STEM fields.
CARNIVAL 