About Me

I am Alasdair, a machine learning engineer who is currently working in the field of speech recognition. My original background was in audio processing, completing an undergraduate degree at Glasgow Caledonian University in Audio Systems Engineering in 2019. After trying (and failing) to get a graduate job and a few years working in a call centre, I became interested in machine learning and returned to education with a Masters Degree at the University of Edinburgh in Speech and Language Processing from which I graduated in 2022.

Speech recognition + processing (and natural language processing) are fields that have been transformed in recent years by machine learning, deep learning and AI. I'm especially interested in trying to see if new approaches in text-based and image-based domains can be applied and transferred to solving problems in audio processing: the flexibility of machine learning (once data has been reshaped and formatted correctly) is my favourite thing about it.

My aspiration in my career to help solve interesting problems in audio, speech and language.

What is this blog?

This blog is a place for me to discuss aspects of speech, audio and machine learning that I find interesting outside of my work commitments. It can also be a landing page for out-of-work learning projects: ie. adding some extra detail and motivation to Github projects I've worked on. Finally, it gives me a chance to learn about maintaining and hosting a simple static web blog using Python - something I have always been curious about doing, but never got round to!