About

Hello, I am a research scientist at Google, focusing on large-scale speech and language modeling in the Speech Team. My research interests include speech processing, large language models and multilinguality. I obtained my PhD at the Graduate school of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Email (office): tsaeki [at] google.com
Email (personal): saefrospace [at] gmail.com

Education

Apr. 2021 - Mar. 2024
Ph.D. Degree in Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, Japan
Department of Creative Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology
Supervisor: Prof. Hiroshi Saruwatari
Apr. 2019 - Mar. 2021
Master’s Degree in Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, Japan
Department of Creative Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology
Supervisor: Prof. Hiroshi Saruwatari
Apr. 2015 - Mar. 2019
Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Japan
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Faculty of Engineering

June 2024
IEICE ISS Young Researcher’s Award in Speech Field [link]
IEICE Speech Committee
Mar. 2024
Dean’s Award [link]
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
July 2022
Yamashita SIG Research Award [link]
Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
June 2022
Best Paper Award from IEICE [link]
The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE)
Mar. 2022
Ranked 1st Place in 10/16 Metrics [link]
VoiceMOS Challenge 2022 at INTERSPEECH 2022
Mar. 2022
Telecom System Technology Award for Students [link]
The Telecommunication Advancement Foundation
Oct. 2021
Best Student Presentation Award [link]
Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ)
Mar. 2021
Best Student Poster Award [link]
IEICE Speech Committee
Feb. 2019
Award for Excellence (2nd Place)
Recruit Holdings NLP Hackathon

Aug. 2022
Google East Asia Student Travel Grants
Google
Mar. 2022
UTokyo-TOYOTA Study Abroad Scholarship in AI Field
The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2022 - Mar. 2024
Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC2)
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
July 2021
Tobitate Study Abroad Initiative (Declined due to COVID19)
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
June 2021 - Mar. 2022
TOYOTA/Dwango AI Scholarship
The University of Tokyo

Feb. 2024 - present
Google, Research Scientist
Researching on speech processing.
May 2023 - Aug. 2023
Google New York, Research Intern
Researched on massive multilingual speech synthesis.
Oct. 2022 - Jan. 2023
Carnegie Mellon University, Visiting Scholar
Researched on low-resource multilingual speech synthesis.
Apr. 2022 - Sep. 2022
Google Tokyo, Student Researcher
Researched on massive multilingual semi-supervised learning for speech synthesis.
Mar. 2021 - Mar. 2022
LINE Corporation, Part-Time Researcher
Researched on noise-robust text-to-speech synthesis.
Aug. 2021 - Sep. 2021
Preferred Networks, Research Intern
Worked on singing voice conversion.
Aug. 2019 - Sep. 2019
NEC Datascience Research Laboratories, Research Intern
Worked on speech enhancement.
Feb. 2019 - June 2019
Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd., Engineering Intern & Part-Time Engineer
Worked on data analysis and developed recommendation engine.

Aug. 2024
Featured as Recommended Ph.D. Thesis in 2023 [link]
Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
July 2024
Published review article on UTMOS (automatic speech quality assessment method) [link]
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan
April 2024
Research Talk at NII Yamagishi Lab.
Multilingual Low-Resource Speech Synthesis Leveraging Self-Supervised/Unsupervised Learning
June 2022
Research Talk at Google Tokyo
Self-Supervised Speech Resotoration for Historical Audio
Jan. 2021
Exhibition at Sainokuni Buisiness Arena 2021
Research on Stress-Free, Real-Time, and Full-Band Voice Conversion Based on Perceptual Model
Oct. 2020
Exhibition at CEATEC 2020
Research on Stress-Free, Real-Time, and Full-Band Voice Conversion Based on Perceptual Model