Ramón Fernandez Astudillo

I am currently senior research scientist at Unbabel, a Y-combinator start-up focusing on machine translation and crowdsourcing, where I lead the team in charge of automatic evaluation of machine and human translation quality, I obtained the PhD degree with distinction from the Technical University of Berlin in 2010 in the fields of signal processing and machine learning. For the pursuit of my degree I was awarded with a "La Caixa" Foundation fellowship, the top private funding programme in Spain, in collaboration with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From 2010 to 2015, I was a post-doctoral researcher at INESC-ID Lisboa with a "Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia" fellowship. I currently maintain the role of associate researcher at INESC-ID. My research interests span signal processing and machine learning. I have contributed both to latent variable and deep learning research with +50 papers in the top conferences and Journals in speech and language processing including the Interspeech, ICASSP, ASRU, ACL and EMNLP conferences as well as IEEE and ACL Transactions Journals. I am also a co-founder of the Special Interest group for Robust Speech Processing (RoSP-SIG) and have contributed to the sub-field of observation uncertainty with a tutorial and special session on the topic. I serves in scientific committees of both speech and language conferences including Interspeech, ICASSP and EMNLP as well of machine learning (NIPS) and reviews for IEEE Transactions in Speech and Language Processing, Computer Science and Language Journals among others. I also lecture special classes in deep learning at the speech processing masters course of "Instituto Superior Técnico" (IST). As a labs tutor since 2011 and organizer since 2015, I have contributed to the Lisbon Machine Learning Schools (LxMLS) introducing two new days to the school on the topic of deep learning and leading new initiatives such as the international monitors program.