Our Student Enes Mahmut Kulak Succeeds in International AI Competitions

Computer Engineering junior Enes Mahmut Kulak has achieved notable results in international AI competitions. Together with his teammate, he won first place in the WAXAL Speech Recognition Challenge, organized by Google Research for African languages, which drew more than 1,400 participants. For these low-resource languages, the team developed a method to automatically clean noisy, mislabeled training data. They then combined eight models, each prone to different kinds of errors, into an ensemble. This lets the models correct one another and converge on the most accurate transcription. The Google team has invited the winning teams to present their solutions to Google researchers. Kulak also placed second in both the Spanish-English and Indonesian-Javanese tracks of “Lost in Transcription”, Mozilla Data Collective’s code-switched speech recognition challenge, bringing his total prize winnings to approximately USD 8,000.

• WAXAL: https://blog.google/intl/en-africa/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/meet-the-winners-of-the-waxal-speech-recognition-challenge/
• Lost in Transcription (Spanish-English): https://competitions.mozilladatacollective.com/competitions/2/lost-in-transcription-sp-en/leaderboard/
• Lost in Transcription (Indonesian-Javanese): https://competitions.mozilladatacollective.com/competitions/1/lost-in-transcription-in-jv/leaderboard/