We are delighted to announce that Dr. Marsal Gavaldà has joined Expect Labs as our new Director of Research. So who exactly is Dr. Marsal Gavaldà? He likes to attempt to answer that question with the above illustration from The New Yorker. Like the cartoon suggests, language is very much open to interpretation. Marsal is inspired by this aspect of communication, devoting his life to a discipline called language technologies, which lies at the intersection of linguistics and computer science.
Marsal has over fifteen years of experience building computer systems that understand human language. His experiences include speech-to-speech translation, disruptive call center applications, and next-generation speech and text analytics. Marsal earned his PhD in Language and Information Technologies, along with an MS in Computational Linguistics, at Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS in Computer Science at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain. Before joining Expect Labs, Marsal was the Vice President of Research and Principal Language Scientist at Nexidia, where he headed up Nexidia’s core technology team. Gavaldà also served as the Director of Language Technologies at Dictaphone and was a Senior Research Scientist at M*Modal.
Every summer, Marsal organizes a technology and culture summit at the Universitat Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Barcelona, on topics as wide-ranging as machine translation, music, and the neuroscience of free will.
Here are some fun facts about Marsal:
- Had his first brush with fame as a child, appearing in a popular Spanish mathematics textbook
- Is the author of over 30 technical and literary publications
- Owns over a dozen patents
- Is fluent in six languages
Expect Labs is so excited for the expertise that Marsal will bring to the team. Benvingut, Marsal!
(Source: newyorker.com)
