José Joaquín Atria
Speech Scientist and Software Developer

Contact Information
- Website
- http://pinguinorodriguez.cl
- jjatria@gmail.com
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
Web Presence
- Github
- jjatria
- GitLab
- jjatria
- StackOverflow
- jja
- CPAN
- JJATRIA
- jjatria
- Mastodon
- jjatria@mastodon.cloud
- Keybase
- jjatria
- ORCID
- orcid.org/0000-0003-2761-1007
- PGP
- 3375 C9A4 F84E C44B
About
Work Experience
CV-Library
Developer
—
CV-Library is the UK’s leading independent job board and an area expert in recruitment. It hosts over 170,000 jobs across all sectors for the UK’s jobseekers, and supports recruiters and employers with their services.
I am part of the development team focused on bringing new features into the site.
Voiceable
Co-Founder and Lead Speech Scientist
—
Voiceable is an enterprise to develop an effective and science-based approach for evaluating the delivery of public speakers, and offer coaching when necessary. After considerable research and development, a working prototype will soon be released.
My work is mainly in developing the tools for the acoustic analysis underlying the evaluation of speech.
As part of the technical team, I am also in charge of implementing the AWS worker nodes that handle the client requests.
This includes the administration of the AWS setup.
University of Sheffield
Research Facilitator in Speech Technology
—
The CloudCAST project aims to make it possible for researchers, developers, and clinicians to create tools that benefit from state-of-the-art developments in speech technologies. When active, developers will be able to connect their applications to the service and receive speech recognition using recognisers trained on a per-user level.
Part of my responsibilities included the design of the API that will handle both the management of user projects and the training and use of speech recognisers.
My job also included the implementation of the bridge between our applications and the underlying ASR library. Currently, this means interacting with Kaldi using a GStreamer pipeline
I was also in charge of the administration of the main project machine
Personal Projects
CPrAN
Roles
- Lead designer
- Main author
—
CPrAN is an effort to provide the Praat community with a facility to write and distribute modules (or packages).
Modules use Praat’s plugin mechanic to ensure existing versions of Praat are also compatible
The reference CPrAN client (written in Perl using Moose::App::Cmd) handles installation, browsing, dependency management, and automatic testing
Besides designing the base architecture, I have released multiple modules covering selection management, smart generation of GUI wizards, enabling support for variadic procedures, JSON serialisation and deserialisation, and a pure-Praat implementation of the printf family of functions
Bringing support for automated testing in Praat included writing a Praat plugin for producing TAP output with an interface closely modeled after that of Test::More
Volunteer Work
Praat
Contributor
Praat is a GPL-licensed acoustic analysis software extensively used in Phonetics research. It uses an internal scripting language for automating tasks.
I am active in the users list, and I’m the most active responder in the Praat category in StackOverflow
I am an expert user of Praat, specialising particularly in its programmatic use
Being this involved in the community has allowed me to collaborate with many different people including researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs both in the development of new tools and in the role of professional consultant
I’ve written multiple syntax lexers for Praat, which are now shipped with Rouge (Ruby), Pygments (Python), Kate (XML), and ace (JavaScript)
CPAN
Author and contributor
Since completing my PhD I’ve been progressively more active in Perl development, and have to date released a handful of my own modules, and become a co-maintainer of existing projects
Mastodon::Client: Author. Full implementation of the client-side API for Mastodon, highlighted in the 2017 roundup of What’s new on CPAN at the Perl Conference in Washington
Net::Async::MPD: Author. Fully-featured asynchronous MPD client built on top of IO::Async
Mojolicious::Plugin::Authentication: Co-maintainer. Facilitate user authentication in Mojolicious apps
AWS::CLI::Config: Co-maintainer. I took over maintenance recently and implemented support for nested values in AWS config files
AnyEvent::WebSocket::Client: Contributor. I implemented support for sending close codes and reasons when closing connections
GitLab::API::v3: Contributor. I implemented a number of small changes and bug fixes, as well as the first version of login support
I participated in the Pull Request Challenge in 2017 and 2018
I’ve presented at the Perl Conference in Amsterdam, 2017, and regularly attend Perl conferences and meetups
I’ve contributed to a number of other distributions, in various ways
youtube-dl
Contributor
youtube-dl is a full-fledged video data scraper written in Python with support for close to 1000 different websites
I implemented support for the BioBioTV website.
STEMNET
STEM Ambassador
STEMNET is a UK network that works with schools, colleges and private companies to promote STEM subjects and provide opportunities for young people to meet role-models and experience STEM activities.
Designed and co-taught an “Introduction to programming” course for secondary school children in the UK
Education
Awards
BecasChile Scholarship for PhD Studies
CONICyT
The BecasChile Scholarship, assigned by the Chilean government, provides support for overseas graduate studies. This scholarship fully financed my PhD studies in both London and Amherst, MA.
Scholarship for Research Studies
MEXT
MEXT (the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) grants scholarships for graduate and undergraduate overseas students. I was granted a 2-year scholarship to attend the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies to undertake the research that lead to my PhD.
Scholarship for Short-term Studies
JASSO
The Japan Student Services Organization offers support for undergraduate students to attend Japanese universities for cultural and academic exchange. With this scholarship, I wa able to attend the University of Tokyo for a year as a part of their AIKOM exchange program.
Skills
Data Science
-
Level: Advanced
Keywords
- R
- Perl
- Python
- Matlab / Octave
Perl
-
Level: Advanced
Keywords
- Moo(se)?
- DBIx::Class
- AnyEvent
- IO::Async
- Mojolicious
- Log::Any
- Type::Tiny
Version Control
-
Level: Advanced
Keywords
- git
- mercurial
Typesetting
-
Level: Advanced
Keywords
- LaTeX
- pgfplots
- pandoc
Web Development
-
Level: Intermediate
Keywords
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
Continuous Integration
-
Level: Intermediate
Keywords
- Jenkins
- Gerrit
- GitLab CI
- Travis CI
- Docker
Languages
Spanish
Native
English
Near-native (IELTS 8.5)
Japanese
Intermediate (JLPT 2)
Interests
-
Rock climbing