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About me: Vikrant Singh Tomar, Ph.D.

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Profile Summary

  • I am an experienced, driven, and entrepreneurial professional with extensive background in building and leading artificial-intelligence/machine-learning oragnizations.
  • Built Fluent.ai inc. from zero into a well-known provider of on-device/offline speech recognition solutions.
    • Led the research and tech roadmap, patents and IP growth/acquisition plan, business as well as tech partnerships, and overall strategy of the company.
    • Led the development of tiny (≈ 40KB) deep learning models for speech recognition on low-power edge devices.
    • Filed, acquired, and licensed 15+ patents; several of which have been granted.
    • Built and grew partnerships with various chip manufacturers partners, such as, ARM, CEVA, DSPG, Ambiq, NXP, DSPC etc.
    • Contributed to sales and business development. Negotiated OEM/ODM deals.
    • Helped raise investments from angels and VCs over multiple rounds.
  • PhD in speech and AI.
  • Active research in AI/machine learning, deep learning, tinyML.

More details

I founded Fluent.ai and grew it, in my role as Founder and CTO, from zero to a well-known provider of speech recognition systemss. At Fluent.ai, we developed cutting-edge machine learning techniques for offline, on-device voice user interfaces targetted at tinyML, low-power embedded devices, smart-home devices, and wearables. We used a unique end-to-end spoken language understanding system. Unlike conventional speech recognition systems [speech --> text --> intent], these models do not require the intermediate text step and are able able to directly go from speech to intent, much like humans. Please see the website for more details.

My research interests are in the general area of artificial intelligence, particularly for speech and langauge understanding, but also beyond for vision, generative networks, reinforcement learning, etc. I completed my PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. I was associated with the speech and language research group supervised by Dr. Richard Rose [now at Google].

Prior to joining McGill, I worked as a research fellow in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay [IIT B], Mumbai, India. I worked with the Information Networks laboratory. I was primarily associated with the TTSL IIT Bombay Center of Excellence in Telecommunications [TICET], one of the six Telecom Centers Of Excellence [TCOE] set up by the Department of Telecommunications [DoT], Govt. of India.

I earned my B.Tech. in Information and Communication Technology [ICT] from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology [DA-IICT], Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India in May 2008. During my stay at DA-IICT, I was affiliated with Communications and Signal Processing [CSP], NextGenWireless and Speech Communications research groups. I also served as the vice chair-person of IEEE student branch, DA-IICT for 2007-08.

Education

Work Experience Summary

  • Avsr AI Inc., | CoFounder | Stealth -- More details soon.
  • RaceRocksRaceRocks., Vancouver, Canada | Head of Technology | May 2023 -- Sept 2023
  • Fluent.ai Inc., Montreal, QC, Canada | Founder and CTO | May 2015 -- Oct 2022
  • Nuance Comm. Inc., Montreal, QC, Canada | Research Scientist | Sept 2013 -- Feb 2014
  • Vestec Inc., Waterloo, ON, Canada | Research Scientist Consultant | May 2012 -- Dec 2012
  • McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada | Teaching Assistant and Lecturer | 2010 - 2013 [various]
  • IIT Bombay, Mumbai India | Research Scholar | July 2008 - Dec 2010

Research Interests

  • General Artificial Intelligence
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Speech and language processing including acoustic modeling, NLU, etc.
  • Machine learning for speech synthesis, deepfakes and other generative models Please refer to my recent publications for more details about my current area of work.

End to End SLU special session at ICASSP 2020

I am collaborating with three other researchers to organize End to End Spoken Language Understanding workshop at ICASSP 2020. Please see the link for more information.

Awards and Grants (from student life era)