Raphael Lenain, Developer in London, United Kingdom
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Raphael Lenain

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Deep Learning Developer

Location
London, United Kingdom
Toptal Member Since
March 3, 2022

Raphael graduated with a master’s degree in computational and mathematical engineering from Stanford with a specialization in Deep Learning research. He has worked as first engineer in two seed stage London startups, defining their research and Machine Learning (ML) engineering culture. His specializations are in speech and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Raphael has published papers at top ML conferences such as ICML and INTERSPEECH and is the main author on a widely adopted Python package.

Portfolio

Samsung
Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Federated Learning...
Novoic Ltd
Deep Learning, Python, Software Development, Agile, GPT...
Papercup Technologies Ltd
Python, Text to Speech (TTS), Software Development, PyTorch, Speech Recognition...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Vim Text Editor, Python, MacOS, Linux, PyTorch, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

The most amazing...

...project I’ve led was the development of a Python package which fully automated data preprocessing, training, and validation of ML models.

Work Experience

Research Software Engineer

2021 - PRESENT
Samsung
  • Researched and developed applications of Federated Learning (FL) and Knowledge Distillation (KD) to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models.
  • Assisted with maintenance of internal preprocessing, training, and testing pipeline of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models.
  • Attended brainstorming and research meetings, discussing latest trends and state of the art in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Federated Learning (FL).
Technologies: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Federated Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice Recognition

Research Engineer

2020 - 2021
Novoic Ltd
  • Researched Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech Deep Learning technology applications to medical data and published papers at top conferences (ICML, INTERSPEECH).
  • Developed an internal package which fully automated preprocessing, training and validation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech Deep Learning models.
  • Developed a widely adopted (over 350 stars) open-source package, surfboard, and published an accompanying paper at an ML conference (INTERSPEECH).
  • Participated in the decision and management of company operations, sitting on C-suite meetings helping guide the technical roadmap and stressing technical requirements.
  • Built a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) based serverless app which recorded speech on the phone and triggered a Deep Learning pipeline to predict disease status.
Technologies: Deep Learning, Python, Software Development, Agile, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), GPT, Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice Recognition

Machine Learning Engineer

2018 - 2020
Papercup Technologies Ltd
  • Built internal tooling to automate the research, development and deployment cycles of text-to-speech synthesis systems.
  • Led research and co-authored text-to-speech synthesis research papers published at a top ML conference (INTERSPEECH).
  • Mentored an intern through a research summer internship. Resulted in their project published at a top ML conference (INTERSPEECH) and being awarded best project amongs a class of over 200 students.
  • Assisted C-suite members in organizing company operations and deciding on a technical roadmap.
Technologies: Python, Text to Speech (TTS), Software Development, PyTorch, Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice Recognition

Learning De-identified Representations of Prosody from Raw Audio

http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/weston21a/weston21a.pdf
Created a representation learning model trained on raw audio to learn de-identified representations of prosody. I was one of the co-authors of the paper, which involved an ideation phase through whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions, a development phase where we implementated the models in PyTorch using Hugging Face, and our own custom built classes. There was a refining phase during which we tested hypotheses and performed ablation studies to understand the inner workings of our approach, and finally a write up phase leading up to the conference deadline.

Realtalk: Automated Preprocessing, Training, and Validation of Machine Learning

Designed, Implemented, and maintained an internal package which fully automated data preprocessing and Machine Learning (ML) model training and validation. Using this package made our research and deployment pipeline fully streamlined allowing fast iteration and led us to being able to experiment with ML ideas and publish papers in a very short amount of time.

COSCO: Continuous Style Control of Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Researched, designed, and implemented a novel Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis technique to control synthesized speech attributes (emotions, whispering, etc.). Successfully deployed the model in production, which was in use by Papercup customers, and released translated videos across various platforms (e.g., Youtube).

Other

Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text to Speech (TTS), GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Software Development, Federated Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice Recognition, API Integration, Hugging Face, Mathematics, Research

Languages

Python

Libraries/APIs

PyTorch, TensorFlow

Tools

Vim Text Editor, Mathematica

Platforms

Visual Studio Code (VS Code), MacOS, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Paradigms

Agile, Data Science

2016 - 2018

Master's Degree in Computational and Mathematical Engineering

Stanford University - Stanford, CA

2013 - 2016

Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics

Imperial College London - London, UK

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