Heiga Zen
Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind; WaveNet co-author and an original author of HTS speech synthesis
- Principal Scientist (from June 2023), Google DeepMind1
Heiga Zen is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, a role Zen has held since June 2023, according to Google Research's people page. At Google, Zen was with the Speech team from July 2011 to July 2018 and then joined the Brain team; earlier roles include an intern/co-op researcher position at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and a research engineer position at Toshiba Research Europe. Zen was one of the original authors and the first maintainer of the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS), and is a co-author of WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio. Google's page notes that Zen is a fellow of ISCA and IEEE.12
Work
WaveNet (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author of WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio (2016), with Aäron van den Oord, Sander Dieleman, and others.2
HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS) (external site: hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp)Open-source code
Google Research's people page describes Zen as one of the original authors and the first maintainer of HTS. The HTS site says the system's training part is released as patch code to HTK under a free software license.13
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Speech team (July 2011 to July 2018), then Brain team from August 2018, Google (Speech team, then Brain team)1
- Intern/Co-Op researcher (2004–2005), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center1
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