When I left high school, I didn’t really understand the University process or how it worked. Nonetheless, I wanted to go and so I applied to study Mathematics. On completing my BSc Mathematics (Hons), I went on to get my masters, MSc Mathematics of Complex Systems. It was during my final year of my undergrad and my masters where I began using computational methods to solve math problems on real-world data. I came across a studentship advertisement for a PhD in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and driven by my interest in gadgets and robotics I enquired despite having any of the adverts specified requirements. I was successful and began my research. I wanted to look at alternative models of speech that would require less training data so that ASR systems can be developed for low resource languages or applications.
The first two years of my PhD saw me presenting work at speech conferences, being selected for Googles speech workshop two years in a row. Then I secured a 12 week internship with Apple Inc in Cupertino, California. 10 weeks into my internship I had presented my work to the head of Siri Speech and requested to continue the project to completion. I ended up staying in California for 8 months and in completing the project and presenting to the VP of Siri I was then recruited to work full time continuing this work.
I am currently working for Apple, writing up my PhD Thesis, and actively getting involved in STEM activities in my community, this involves talking at BlackSteam2018, developing a free coding workshop for young black students working with schools on content for a twitter handle to help students with maths questions and Mentoring young people who are new to programming.
