David Huggins-daines
Computational Linguist And Document Intelligence Consultant
Sainte-Adèle, Quebec, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Huggins-daines is a computational linguist and document intelligence consultant with 11 years of applied experience building language technologies, from open-source speech tools to PDF structure extraction and CI/CD for core Python libraries. He combines deep research chops—including a PhD-level background at Carnegie Mellon and leadership roles at Nuance—with hands-on engineering contributions to notable projects like PocketSphinx and pdfplumber. His work spans force-alignment for speech, robust PDF structure parsing, and productionizing models for time-series analysis of network latency, showing a knack for turning complex linguistic data into practical systems. Based in Sainte-Adèle, Quebec, he also brings civic leadership experience as a city councillor focused on mobility, planning and IT, reflecting a pragmatic, community-minded approach. A former baker, bicycle mechanic and farmer, he favors low-technology, high-impact solutions that make real-world problems easier to solve.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Certificat Création Littéraire, Certificat Création Littéraire at UQAM | Université du Québec à MontréalBachelor of Arts - BA Linguistics, Bachelor of Arts - BA Linguistics at University of OttawaPhD Language Technologies, PhD Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University
French, English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
51reputation
28kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (25)
algorithms10
pytest10
python10
c1110
pdf-parsing10
cicd10
c1710
speech-recognition10
setuptools9
data-structure9
command-line-interface9
data-structures9
pip9
blackboard8
testing8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
cmusphinx/pocketsphinx
Sep 2018 - Nov 2022
A small speech recognizer
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:10 releases, 11 reviews, 680 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:David implemented force alignment functionality and a minimal command-line interface to perform force alignment of transcripts. They modified the `batch.c` program to add command-line arguments for specifying transcript files and their locations. Additionally, they introduced changes to `state_align_search.c` to expose a word-level iteration for the force alignment, and incorporated test code for the new functionalities in `test_state_align.c`.
kaldipythonrecognizerspeech-to-textspeech-recognition
pdfminer/pdfminer.six
Jul 2023 - Mar 2025
Community maintained fork of pdfminer - we fathom PDF
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Python Developer
DevOps Engineer & Python DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 10 PRs, 58 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on improving the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, making numerous changes to the build process and dependencies. They updated versions of various tools, fixed linting and type-checking issues, and addressed compatibility issues with different Python versions (including Python 3.12). Additionally, the user made code changes within the Python code base to address build and import issues. The contributions streamlined the development workflow and ensured the project's stability across multiple environments.
extractionpythonpdfpdfminertext-extraction
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