Tom KO Yu Ting

Deputy Director of the Center, Associate Professor

Center for Language, Intelligence and Machines

Education Background
  • 2010.9 to 2014.6: Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(Advisor: Professor Brian Mak)
  • 2008.1-2010.8: Master of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • 2006.9-2007.12: Master of Science in IC Design Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • 2000.9 to 2003.5: Bachelor of Computer Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

 

Work Experience 

  • 2025-present: Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, Associate Professor
  • 2021.10-2024.12: ByteDance AI Lab,Research Scientist
  • 2019.1-2021.9: Southern University of Science and Technology,Assistant Professor (Tenure-track)
  • 2014.6-2019.1: HuaWei Noah’sArt Lab,Researcher
Research Fields
1.Full-duplex speech large model, multimodal large model, deep learning
Class Type
Language, Intelligence and Machines
Personal Website
Email
tomko@slai.edu.cn
Biography

Tom Ko is currently serves as a full-time Associate Professor at SLAI and is the Deputy Director of LIMA Center. Previously, he worked as a Research Scientist at ByteDance's AI Lab and served as an Assistant Professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, and a researcher at Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab.

He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2014. He has published over 50 research papers specializing in speech processing and natural language processing, with more than 5,100 citations. Two pioneering papers in speech augmentation have each received over 1,000 citations.

In recent years, he has focused on the applications of large language models in speech translation, contributing to the development of representative systems such as SpeechT5 and CLASI, with related results published in top conferences like ACL and ICLR. Acknowledged for his excellence, he has received awards such as the Excellent Team Award at ByteDance and the "Future Star" Award at Huawei. He is also an active program committee member and chair for international conferences such as IWSLT and Interspeech, demonstrating his broad influence in both industry and academia.]

Academic Publications

Tom Ko, Vijayaditya Peddinti, Daniel Povey, Sanjeev Khudanpur

"Audio Augmentation for Speech Recognition",

in Proceedings of Interspeech, September, 2015

 

Tom Ko, Vijayaditya Peddinti, Daniel Povey, Michael L. Seltzer, Sanjeev Khudanpur

"A Study on Data Augmentation of Reverberant Speech for Robust Speech Recognition",

in Proceedings of ICASSP, March, 2017

 

Yingke Zhu, Tom Ko, David Snyder, Brian Mak, Daniel Povey

"Self-Attentive Speaker Embeddings for Text-Independent Speaker Verification",

in Proceedings of Interspeech, September, 2018

 

Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei

“Speecht5: Unified-modal encoder-decoder pre-training for spoken language processing”,

in Proceedings of ACL, May, 2022

 

Xinhao Mei, Chutong Meng, Haohe Liu, Qiuqiang Kong, Tom Ko, … "Wavcaps: A chatgpt-assisted weakly-labelled audio captioning dataset for audio-language multimodal research", IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2024