personal

• made in canada
• also a hong kong permanent resident
• pays (expensive) rent in mountain view, california
• speaks english, cantonese and (very) limited french, mandarin
• aged 21 22 23 too many years
• in a long-term relationship with PhD Thesis and it's complicated update: we've broken up
• defended my thesis, "End-to-End Speech Recognition Models" to my PhD Committee (Ian Lane, Bhiksha Raj, Chris Dyer, Quoc Le) in October 2016
• currently enjoying unemployment

education

• 2011 to 2016 enslaved at Carnegie Mellon University and rewarded with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• 2011 to 2013 educated at Carnegie Mellon University and rewarded with a MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• 2006 to 2011 educated at the University of Waterloo and rewarded with a BASc in Computer Engineering and Option in Management Sciences
• 2010 partied as an exchange student at the National University of Singapore
• 2002 to 2006 educated at Unionville High School and rewarded with an Ontario secondary school diploma
• 1992 to 2002 educated at Whitefield Christian Schools and gifted with the knowledge of the Gospel

experiences

• 2016 interned at Google Research as a researcher overdosing Google Brain with Latent Sequence Decompositions
• 2015 interned at Google Research as a researcher teaching Google Brain how to Listen, Attend and Spell
• 2015 interned part-time at Google Research cooking secret Google Brain sauce
• 2014 interned part-time at Google Research as a moocher eating sushi (e.g., continuation of internship project)
• 2014 interned at Google Research as a researcher working on natural language processing
• 2012 interned at Google as a software engineer working on machine learning ranking and ads
• 2010 interned at TD Securities as a quantitative financial engineer working on equity derivative pricing
• 2009 interned at Amazon as a software engineer working on amazon prime
• 2009 interned at Google as a software engineer working on file systems
• 2008 interned at Intel as a platform architecture engineer working on mobile platforms
• 2007 interned at NVIDIA as a software engineer working on directx drivers
• 2007 interned at AMD as a hardware engineer working on dtv hardware

publications

• Takaaki Hori, Shinji Watanabe, Yu Zhang and William Chan, "Advances in Joint CTC-Attention based End-to-End Speech Recognition with a Deep CNN Encoder and RNN-LM," in INTERSPEECH 2017.
• William Chan, Yu Zhang, Quoc Le and Navdeep Jaitly, "Latent Sequence Decompositions," in ICLR 2017.
• Yu Zhang, William Chan and Navdeep Jaitly, "Very Deep Convolutional Networks for End-to-End Speech Recognition," in ICASSP 2017.
• William Chan and Ian Lane, "On Online Attention-based Speech Recognition and Joint Mandarin Character-Pinyin Training," in INTERSPEECH 2016.
• Guan-Lin Chao, William Chan and Ian Lane, "Speaker-Targeted Audio-Visual Models for Speech Recognition in Cocktail-Party Environments," in INTERSPEECH 2016.
• William Chan, Navdeep Jaitly, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, "Listen, Attend and Spell: A Neural Network for Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition," in ICASSP 2016 (Student Paper Award; earlier version at NIPS Deep Learning Symposium 2015).
• William Chan and Ian Lane, "Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Acoustic Modelling," in arXiv 2015.
• William Chan, Nan Rosemary Ke and Ian Lane, "Transferring Knowledge from a RNN to a DNN," in INTERSPEECH 2015.
• William Chan and Ian Lane, "Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Low Resource Languages," in ICASSP 2015.
• William Chan and Ian Lane, "Distributed Asynchronous Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks," in INTERSPEECH 2014.
• Le Nguyen, Pang Wu, William Chan, Wei Peng and Joy Zhang, "Predicting Collective Sentiment Dynamics from Time-series Social Media", in ACM SIGKDD WISDOM 2012.
• William Chan and Jason Lohn, "Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity with Memristive Synapse in Neuromorphic Systems," in IEEE IJCNN 2012 (Travel Fellowship for Spiking Neural Networks).

enjoyments

• running, badminton, yoga, hiking, canoeing
• eating (new zealand grass fed) steaks, (australian) lobsters, sushi
• drinking (new zealand) sauvignon blanc and (napa valley) cabernet sauvignon
• trading stocks (only when money is made)
• photography (newest gf is canon 6d, 24-105L, ex-gf was panasonic lumix gf1, 20mm, 7-14mm, exex-gf was canon xsi, 18-55mm, 50mm, 60mm macro, 17-40L)
• travelling and has been to canada, usa, great britain, belgium, france, luxembourg, switzerland, italy, germany, hong kong, china, japan, taiwan, singapore, indonesia, malaysia, thailand, cambodia, australia, new zealand