I am a researcher in haptics and audio, and a software developer at heart. A couple of years ago I made a graceful exit from academia to flirt with applications of my skillset in the industry, and have since been doing contract work on various projects. I am always on the lookout for interesting projects at the intersection of media (visual/audio/haptic signals) and machine learning.
I’ve lived in 4 countries in the last 10 years, but my current residence is in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Latest work:
- I recently finished my work as CTO for DAISYS, a text-to-speech company focused on novel voice generation and highly controllable speech synthesis. Since 2022, I lead an engineering team that improved their existing TTS models with respect to quality (intonation, correctness), controllability, and scalability; developed a web-facing product and API; and a semi-automatic data acquisition pipeline to transform in-the-wild audio into speech datasets ready for training.
- For NavInfo Europe, development of scenario extraction methods for highway driving using computer vision. Road reconstruction, vehicle detection, and event identification. The work is a mix of modern ML and classic CV methods, using technologies such as PyTorch, OpenCV, and Scikit-Learn. A major contribution was estimation of road topology from dashcam video feeding a birds-eye view projection into a BiLSTM-CRF model trained on highway map data.
Previous highlights:
- Measurement system for fingerpad skin deformation under normal loading (for MSLab.
- Implementation and optimization of a neural network-driven real time audio filter by fast convolution (for Enosis VR), work that is now part of an HP product.
- Design and implementation of real-time rendering methods for ultrasound haptics (for MSLab).
- Encoding and real time synthesis of physically-based audio using neural networks in Sounderfeit (personal project while at Inria Chile)
- Development of new physics back-end using Inria’s Siconos for the Gazebo robotics simulator — and some major enhancements to Siconos mechanics in the process, including support for friction and detents within joint constraints (for Inria Chile).
Some older work, projects in which I was a prime mover:
- DIMPLE is a 3D haptic environment intended to be used in conjunction with creativity tools such as PureData, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, etc.
- libmapper is a library for mapping Open Sound Control messages between devices on a local network in a decentralized manner. (Co-developed originally with Joseph Malloch, work continues by the IDMIL team today!)
- Music systems, LoopDub is among several systems I developed over the years to play live techno music, all used on stage at some point.
- Investigated methods for adapting physical bowed string models for force feedback haptics, including an evaluation of velocity estimators for friction-driven haptics (PhD work).
Open source:
I am the maintainer of the popular liblo library for Open Sound Control, a contributor for the RtMidi/RtAudio libraries with Gary Scavone, and I also maintain a Debian package on the Science team, namely Siconos.
My CV can be found here (PDF), please get in touch if you’ve got some great ideas!
