The Speakers
S Umesh
S. Umesh is currently Professor in the Dept of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, in 1993. From 1993 to 1996, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the City University of New York. Since 1996 he has been with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at AT&T Research Laboratories, Florham Park, NJ, the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge University, Cambridge, U.K., and the Department of Computer Science (Lehrstuhl für Informatik VI), RWTH-Aachen, Aachen, Germany. His recent research interests have been mainly in the area of speaker normalization and acoustic modeling and their application in large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition systems. He has also worked in the areas of statistical signal processing and time-varying spectral analysis. Dr. Umesh is a recipient of the Indian AICTE Career Award for Young Teachers in 1997 and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2004.
Vivek Raghavan
Vivek is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and out-of-the-box problem solver.
Vivek Raghavan is Chief Product Manager and Biometric Architect at the Unique Identification Authority of India. He has been responsible (as a volunteer) for the design and roll out of the technology platform for Aadhaar, the world’s largest identity program. He joined the Aadhaar project before the first Aadhaar was issued, and was there when the billionth person was enrolled into Aadhaar.
Vivek has also been the Chief Technologist for Team Indus, India's entry for the Google Lunar XPrize.
Prior to that he spent 20 years in the field of Electronic Design Automation, successfully founding, running and selling two EDA startups and being responsible for the design and development of multiple market leading EDA products. He has held senior management positions at Magma, Synopsys and Avant! Corporation. Vivek has an M.S. and Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an B. Tech. from IIT Delhi.
Vivek has an eclectic portfolio of Angel investments, reflecting his contrarian viewpoint..
SamudraVijaya K
Dr. SamudraVijaya K carried out research in the area of Speech Signal Processing at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai for 3 decades. Later, he was a Visiting Faculty at IIT Guwahati during 2016-2020. Currently, he is an Adjunct Faculty at IIT Dharwad, and at NMIMS, Mumbai. His primary research interests are Automatic Speech Recognition and Spoken Language Resources.
He has extensively used Sphinx, HTK and Kaldi toolkits. During his visit to CMU in 1988, he implemented 'Dhwani', the first continuous speech recognition system for an Indian language (Hindi).
Deepak KT
Deepak K. T. is working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at Indian Institute of Information Technology Dharwad (IIIT-DWD). He completed his Ph.D. in Electronics and Electrical Engineering Department from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) in the year 2016. His thesis is titled "Foreground Speech Segmentation and Enhancement" under the supervision of Prof. S. R. M. Prasanna.
He received the Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree in Instrumentation Technology from Malnad College of Engineering, University of Mysore, Hassan, India, in the year 1999 and Master of Technology (M.Tech) degree in Bio-Medical Instrumentation from Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering Mysore, Visvesvaraya Technological University, Mysore, India in the year 2002.
Prior to this job he has worked as Technical Leader at NXP Semiconductors, Bangalore from the year 2016 to 2017. He worked as Senior Project Engineer in ST Microelectronics, Bangalore from the year 2005 to 2010, mainly focusing on audio post processing algorithms for the Digital Television group.
S R Mahadeva Prasanna
S. R. M. Prasanna is currently Professor in the Dept of Electrical Engineering, IIT Dharwad, Karnataka, India. He was earlier Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor, all in the Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, IIT Guwahati, Assam, India. His areas of research interest include speech and handwriting processing. He has supervised several PhD Theses in these areas and published in reputed national and international journals and conferences.
Anirudh Gupta
Anirudh is working as a Data Scientist at ThoughtWorks. He works primarily on problems related to speech and NLP. He is currently a part of an open source project which provides recipes for creating state of the art Speech Recognition models for Indic Languages.
Anirudh completed his Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology in 2013 and went on to do his masters in applied mathematics and computational physics as an Erasmus Mundus scholar from several universities in Europe. He wrote his master thesis at Freie Universitaet Berlin in 2015 in the field of computational biophysics. He was also a MITACS Globalink scholar in 2012 for which he received a letter of appreciation from the Prime Minister of Canada for his research work.
Prior to his job he was working as a researcher at the department of theoretical physics at Freie Universitaet Berlin to understand hydration interaction between lipid membranes using large scale molecular dynamics simulations.
Harveen Singh Chadha
Harveen Singh Chadha is working as a Data Scientist in Thoughtworks. He has 7 years of industry experience in building and deploying end to end Deep learning systems on various business use cases. He is currently building Vakyansh which is a Self Supervised learning based open source toolkit for building Automatic Speech recognition systems in 23 Indic Languages. His team secured 1st position in English ASR Challenge hosted by IIT Madras and Top 5 in Interspeech 2021 Multilingual ASR challenge for Indic languages.
Prior to Thoughtworks, Harveen has worked as a Technologist in Wipro’s CTO team where his role was to build AR based Vision system for Laptop repair. He worked as a Specialist Programmer with Infosys Advanced Technology Group from 2014-2019 where his role was building object detection systems for Self Driving Cars.
He has experience working with Deep learning in all verticals: Vision, Natural Language & Speech. His interests are to leverage the power of AI in healthcare and finance domain. He is also the author of book “The Applied TensorFlow and Keras Workshop: Build a Bitcoin price predictor”. He also works as a volunteer with Udacity to review courses on AI. His medium blogs have over 2 Million views.
Rajat Singhal
Rajat Singhal - Technology Principal, Software Architect at ThoughtWorks
Rajat is a technology evangelist and seasoned software professional with around 15 years of extensive experience in the area of architecture and development. He is experienced in defining and executing tech strategies for a variety of applications and organizations.
He is a proponent of Agile Principles with eXtreme Programming (XP) practices like Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, CI/CD, Domain Driven Design, Infrastructure as Code. He is a polyglot programmer with experience in Java, Scala, Python, Clojure, Javascript, Typescript, C#. He is proficient in building applications operating at scale. He is proficient in designing and developing data pipelines using Hadoop, Spark, Kubernetes etc. He also has good experience in building real time systems using Kafka, Spark, Apache Flink etc. He has built variety of systems on various cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, OCI
Rajat has worked on multiple diverse projects in areas spanning to :
Lead generation and prediction using Spark, Hadoop, Hive, Impala on Cloudera
High scale mobile application for food ordering with Java API, Kafka, Mongo DB, Aerospike on AWS
Fast event streaming application in insurance using Kafka, Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud
Speech Recognition platform using Airflow, Kubernetes, Deep Learning, MLOps on GCP
High scale crowdsourcing application using Javascript, Node.js on AWS EKS
Rajat is currently a part of an open source project which provides recipes for creating state of the art Speech Recognition models for Indic Languages. (link: https://open-speech-ekstep.github.io/). He is also a part of India Government's mission of making Indic Language Data, AI Models, Tools and related web services accessible to India digital ecosystem.(link: https://nplt.in/demo/)