We are honoured to share that Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria has been listed in MIT Technology Review’s 2023 Under 35 Innovators for Asia-Pacific!
The prestigious list was announced today (2 November 2023) at an awards ceremony held in conjunction with the Global Youth Science and Technology Forum in Zhejiang China.
The award honours innovators under the age of 35 for their work in shaping the future of technology in various fields such as AI, biotechnology and health business, as well as climate change and energy. The Asia-Pacific list covers innovators from South-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
Assistant Prof Poria is the sixth SUTD professor to have made it into the list and the only one so far to be selected under the Visionaries category, which recognises innovators for their insights into the future of technology. His groundbreaking work in AI includes the development of several multimodal understanding and generative systems. Amongst his many works is a text-to-audio AI model called TANGO, which is a Latent-Diffusion Model (LDM) producing sound effects, including human speech and music, from text. In other words, users could type “make the sound of a barking dog with a huge waterfall behind it” and the system would produce the sound within a split second. Soujanya’s research paper on TANGO (‘Text-to-Audio Generation using Instruction-Tuned LLM and Latent Diffusion Model’, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.13731), which was first published in April 2023, became so popular that it attracted a sound designer from Hollywood who wanted to explore the possibility of licensing the model.
Earlier this month, Assistant Prof Poria was also awarded the Young Scientist Award at the President’s Science & Technology Awards. He is ranked 441 amongst more than 356,000 scientists in the world according to a list as compiled by Stanford University, making him one of the top 0.1% scientists in his field.