Autophon Team

Nate Young is the founder and project lead of Autophon. His responsibilities include procuring funding, training and validating the language models, harvesting and enhancing the language dictionaries, managing front- and backend development, and testing and validating the app's functionality. Nate works as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, and is a lecturer at The Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. A native of North Carolina, Nate has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Queen Mary, University of London (2020), an M.A. in Linguistics from Stockholm University (2015), and a B.S. in Business Administration and B.A. in Slavic Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2004).

Kaosi Anikwe is Autophon's lead developer and has been on the project since January, 2023. While several freelance developers have worked on Autophon, Anikwe has been on the project for the longest and is responsible for a majority of the advanced features in the application. He is currently a student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka campus, studying Genetics. He is also the founder of BrainText, a service that allows users to send WhatsApp messages to ChatGPT and receive instant responses. Kaosi dedicates much of his free time as a tenor in the award-winning UN Nsukka choir.

Ismail Damilola Raji is a freelance software engineer who specializes in AI and machine learning. He joined Autophon in spring 2023 and is responsible for the monophone duplicator that now allows us to train the Montreal Forced Aligner (which is the main component of Autophon's backend) on a reduced and simplified inventory of monophones. Ismail's role is in R&D, and he currently is working on a language-agnostic post-processor that should improve accuracy and be in production by 2024. He received both his M.S. in Computer Engineering (2023) and his B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2015) from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria in Nigeria.

Michael McGarrah is a Senior Platform Engineer (cloud focus) at Envestnet. He has been an invaluable industry mentor to the Autophon project, offering expert guidance on the ins and outs of application development. With over thirty years of experience in IT, his background includes work in data science & analytics, cloud computing, development, database & multi-platform platform management, security and compliance, networking, and R&D.