Autophon Team
Current team
Nate Young
Project Lead
Nate Young is the founder and project lead of Autophon. His responsibilities include procuring funding, training and validating the language models, harvesting and enhancing the language dictionaries, managing front- and backend development, and testing and validating the app's functionality. Nate is an Assistant Professor of Swedish as a Second Language at the Department of Swedish at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. A native of North Carolina, he has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Queen Mary, University of London (2020), an M.A. in Linguistics from Stockholm University (2015), and a B.S. in Business Administration and B.A. in Slavic Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2004).
Kaosi Anikwe
Full Stack Developer
Kaosi Anikwe is the lead developer at Autophon, having spearheaded the project’s technical direction since January 2023. As the longest-tenured developer on the team, Kaosi is responsible for the majority of the application’s advanced features and architectural milestones. A graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he studied Genetics, Kaosi has successfully pivoted into a career in software engineering. He is the founder of BrainText, a service integrating WhatsApp with ChatGPT to provide seamless AI communication. Currently, Kaosi works full-time for a Japan-based technology company. During his time at UNN, he was also a dedicated tenor in the university’s award-winning choir.
Michael McGarrah
Industry Advisor & Mentor
Michael McGarrah is a Senior Platform Engineer (cloud focus) at Envestnet. He has been an invaluable industry mentor to the Autophon project, offering expert guidance on the ins and outs of application development. With over thirty years of experience in IT, his background includes work in data science & analytics, cloud computing, development, database & multi-platform platform management, security and compliance, networking, and R&D.
Prior team members
Ismail Damilola Raji
Research & Development
Ismail Damilola Raji is a freelance software engineer who specializes in AI and machine learning. He joined Autophon in spring 2023 and is responsible for the monophone duplicator that now allows us to train the Montreal Forced Aligner (which is the main component of Autophon's backend) on a reduced and simplified inventory of monophones. Ismail's role is in R&D, and he currently is working on a language-agnostic post-processor that should improve accuracy and be in production by 2024. He received both his M.S. in Computer Engineering (2023) and his B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2015) from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria in Nigeria.