Nu Echo
Employment
Chief Technology Officer at Nu Echo
December 2009 - now
- Help elaborate the technological vision of the company.
- Ensure coherence in the technological choices.
- Supervise the company's R&D projects and coordinate the writing of the R&D scientific report.
- Develop relationships with academic research groups.
- Contribute on a regular basis to the corporate blog.
- Provide technical expertise on formal grammars, robust parsing, natural language processing.
Product Manager / NuGram at Nu Echo
July 2009 - now
- Define the product roadmap and feature set.
- Gather feature requests from customers.
- Contribute to the marketing strategy (blog posts, twitter feed, brochures, tradeshow booth demos, etc.). Designed the web site and recorded several screencasts.
- Provide first line support for NuGram customers.
Partner at Nu Echo
September 2007 - now
- Work on new product initiatives.
- Contribute to the day to day management of the company.
Lead Software Developer at Nu Echo
August 2003 - now
- Designed and contributed to the implementation of NuGram IDE, a complete suite of (static and dynamic) speech-recognition grammar development and analysis tools. NuGram IDE Basic Edition has been integrated into Voxeo's VoiceObjects developer edition, which is freely available.
- Supervised all research aspects of NuGram IDE, including the robust parsing, sentence generation, and ambiguity detection algorithms.
- Designed and supervised the development and deployment of NuGram Server, a hosted infrastructure for the management of static and dynamic speech recognition grammars offering a RESTful API. Implemented client APIs in several languages (Java, ECMAScript, Python, Ruby, Erlang, and VoiceXML 2.0).
- Designed and implemented several variants of a new inheritance-based language for developing speech applications based on hierarchical finite-state machines. The language was used in all of Nu Echo's voice applications.
- Designed, contributed to and supervised the development of innovative visualization and editing tools for this language.
- Helped design and develop an application framework for executing speech applications.
- Gave courses on speech-recognition grammar development. Prepared all the relevant training material.
- Gave talks at major tradeshows (SpeechTEK).
- Worked on several large-scale speech-enabled VoiceXML applications.
- Architected two different VoiceXML application frameworks for customers.
- Implemented and deployed a very successfull voice application (www.TalkToSantaClaus.com) that allowed young children to interact with Santa Claus. The application received about 70,000 calls in only a few weeks.
- Supervised developers, researchers, and interns.
- Executed a technical due diligence to assess the ability of the targetted company to deliver a commercial version of its product.
Senior Analyst, R&D at CogniScience Inc.
March 2003 - August 2003
- Designed and implemented an innovative web application framework with servlets and a XML aggregation system for the proprietary language Prisme, a Lisp language.
Senior Analyst, R&D at SGDL Systems
December 2001 - March 2003
- Designed and implemented SGDLstudio, a Scheme programming environment for SGDLscript, a 3D solid modelling language featuring a client-server environment, static analysis and validation of whole modelling projects, and packaging of 3D models for easy deployment on the internet.
Lead Researcher at Locus Dialogue/InfoSpace
December 2000 - December 2001
- Provided technical expertise on formal grammars, compilation and interpretation, robust syntactic analysis for natural language understanding.
- Member of a W3C standards committee (Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition for VoiceXML 2.0).
- Designed a benchmarking framework for the speech technologies group.
- Supervised 2 developers/researchers.
Software developer and Team Leader at Locus Dialogue
July 1997 - December 2000
- Architected various libraries and frameworks to help develop speech applications in a more effective way. Supervised the development and packaging of the SoftDialogue SDK, as well as all the documentation.
- Designed a speech grammar specification language and its associated development environment, ContextBuilder.
- Developed training material for courses on grammar development
- Offered technical support and bug tracking to customers.
- Supervised 4 programmers.
- Participated to trade shows and technical conferences.
Academic Experience
Master thesis co-advisor at Nu Echo
January 2010 - now
Master thesis co-advisor at InfoSpace Speech Solutions
March 2001 - July 2002
Program committee member
2009
- Scheme Workshop 2009, Boston, Massachussetts
Lecturer at Université of Montréal
1994, 2001, 2002, and 2003
- IFT6820 — Programming Languages and Compilation
- IFT3162 — Theory of Programming Languages
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science, U. of Montreal, 1999
Subject: static analysis of functional programming languages
M.Sc. in Computer Science, U. of Montreal, 1993
Subject: Introduction to category theory for computer scientists
B.Sc. in Math. and Computer Science, U. of Montreal, 1992
Publications
Constructing small language models from grammars, F. Picard, D. Boucher, G. Lapalme. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado. Septembre 2002.
Génération de modèles de langages compacts pour la reconnaissance vocale. F. Picard's Master Thesis, July 2002.
GOld - a link-time optimizer for Scheme, D. Boucher. Proceedings of the Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, Montréal, September 2000.
Analyse et optimisation globales de modules compilés séparément. D. Boucher. Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Montréal, December 1999.
Abstract compilation: a new implementation paradigm for static analysis, D. Boucher and M. Feeley. Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Compiler Construction.
Un système pour l'optimisation globale de programmes d'ordre supérieur par compilation abstraite séparée, D. Boucher and M. Feeley. Technical report 992, Université de Montréal, September 1995.
Construction parallèle de l'automate LR(0) : Une application de Multilisp à la compilation, D. Boucher and M. Feeley. Actes des 6e Rencontres Francophones du Parallélisme, juin 1994.
La théorie des catégories en informatique: notions de base et applications. D. Boucher. Master Thesis, August 1993.