Alp Öktem
Lead Computational Linguist
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlp Öktem is a computational linguist and regional researcher based in Barcelona with nine years of experience building speech and language AI for underrepresented and endangered languages. Holding a PhD from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, he has led community-powered data collection and produced production-ready ASR, TTS and MT systems for 15+ languages, including the first neural voice for Catalan. At CLEAR Global and through his own initiatives he has published 20+ datasets and models and integrated APIs used in crisis and development contexts. He combines hands-on engineering—turning zero-resource, messy data into working prototypes—with community engagement that respects cultural context and language stewardship. His portfolio spans projects from Tamazight and Judeo-Spanish to Hausa and Aranese, and he’s partnered with UNICEF, Google, Masakhane and others to make AI linguistically inclusive. Outside of research he’s a practical technologist who drums, bikes and camps, and who values building tools that serve people, not just models.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.), Informatics, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Informatics at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn / University of BonnDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computational Linguistics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computational Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu FabraERASMUS Exchange student, Computer Science, ERASMUS Exchange student, Computer Science at University of BathBachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Computer Science at Bilkent University
Turkish, English, Spanish, Catalan
Stackoverflow
53reputation
1kreached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (96)
speech-processing10
huggingface10
speech10
audio10
audio-processing10
speech-to-text10
speaker-verification10
voice-recognition10
asr10
machine-translation9
nlp9
transformers9
speech-enhancement9
deep-learning9
speaker9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
alpoktem/proscript
Jun 2021 - Oct 2021
Contributions:9 commits, 18 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
translatorswb/autotemplater
Sep 2021 - Nov 2022
Contributions:62 commits, 45 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 1 month
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