![]() In academic research the main goal of the researchers is to advance the state of the art on a given topic and, thanks to it, publish their work in top tier conferences or journals.In addition, here are some other differences I have observed over the years: Money in a small startup is a finite resource, and your research is likely to have an impact on the near/mid-term future of the company. In addition, you need to continuously measure your progress and be able to quickly switch gears if you see the project is not going in the direction you were initially expecting and is stagnating. Research in a small startup means, among other things, that you need to choose very carefully what problems you want to solve, making sure that you can make good progress in a reasonable time. Building such a system was not a trivial task, and I don’t think we are done yet, but what I found most challenging (although also very interesting) has been to always keep a balance between pure research and continuous delivery of results.īuilding a product out of your research at ELSA has been quite different from the research I was used to in universities and corporations I have been lucky to be part of. Our goal was to build an accurate system to detect what pronunciation/intonation mistakes users make when speaking English, and to help them improve by offering relevant feedback. I am aware that both academic and corporate research have many implementation variants, all of them valid if the objectives they set themselves are achieved.Īt ELSA we were set from the start with the objective to build the best English language speech assistant for people that feel shy to practice English with another human or do not have the opportunity or means to do so. In this post I highlight the main differences that exist, in my opinion, between the research team we have built at ELSA and some of the realities I have been able to observe so far during my professional career. This new challenge has been so far both a great learning experience and a hell of a ride! My professional path until that point had been focused on research in speech and multimedia technologies, both in academia and corporate. When I joined ELSA Speak in 2015, I was tasked with the challenge to build and lead the engineering and research teams at ELSA.
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