Hi, I’m Lester Violeta, a Ph.D. student at Nagoya University, Japan at Toda Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Tomoki Toda. I am currently a machine learning researcher at VoiceSwap.AI. Previously, I also worked on research internships at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Tokyo, Japan), NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories (Kanagawa, Japan), and Hitachi Ltd (Tokyo, Japan). My research mainly focuses on voice conversion and automatic speech recognition using different deep learning frameworks, focusing on minimally-resourced datasets. I received the Monbukagakusho Japanese Government Scholarship, a full scholarship that covers my expenses while studying in Japan. I work on AI with the goal of making it more inclusive to everyone.

Prior to this, I received my undergraduate degree from Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. I also have several working experiences in software engineering and machine learning. Moreover, I was also a research exchange student at Institut Catholique d’Arts et Metiers - Site de Paris-Senart in France where I worked on optimizing renewable energy systems for a semester during my undergraduate degree.

Some of my hobbies include language learning, where I learned French during my exchange program and am currently studying Japanese. Having this hobby led me to gain an interest in research in speech and languages, so here I am!

You can download my CV here or check out my papers in my Google Scholar here.

Updates

• Dec 2023: First-author paper accepted at ICASSP 2024 (Seoul, South Korea).
• Oct 2023: Started as a research assistant at Sony CSL in Japan.
• Sept 2023: Three co-authored papers accepted at ASRU 2023 (Taipei, Taiwan). Check them out here, here, and here.
• Aug 2023: First-author paper accepted at APSIPA 2023 (Taipei, Taiwan).
• Apr 2023: Started my Ph.D. degree at Nagoya University.
• Feb 2023: First-author paper accepted at ICASSP 2023 (Rhodes, Greece).
• Jan 2023: I will be co-organizing the Singing Voice Conversion Challenge! More details can be found here. Please join!
• Sep 2022: Co-authored paper accepted at SLT 2022 (Doha, Qatar).
• May 2022: First-author paper accepted at INTERSPEECH 2022 (Incheon, Korea).
• Mar 2022: Accepted as a research intern at NTT Japan.
• Jan 2022: Co-authored paper accepted at ICASSP 2022 (Singapore, Singapore).
• Jan 2022: Accepted as a research intern at Hitachi Ltd.
• Apr 2021: Started my master’s degree at Nagoya University.