PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Joseph Turian

Joseph Turian is an AI researcher and entrepreneur whose work spans semi-supervised language learning, natural language processing and machine learning for audio. He earned a computer science AB at Harvard University in 2001, completed a computer science PhD on constituent parsing at New York University in 2007 under Dan Melamed, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow on deep learning with Yoshua Bengio at Université de Montréal in 2009. After publishing a 2010 word-representation paper with Lev-Arie Ratinov and Bengio that won a 2020 ACL Test-of-Time Award, he headed MetaOptimize LLC in 2011 and co-founded Upshot with Thomas Kim in September 2013, winning a $1 million Salesforce1 Hackathon prize before Workday acquired Upshot in February 2015. His later research includes the November 2020 EMNLP paper “Experience Grounds Language,” the open-source GPU modular synthesizer torchsynth with the billion-sound synth1B1 corpus in April 2021, and the HEAR audio representation benchmark in 2021 and 2022. He is CEO and co-founder of noc0.

Now at
noc0
Badges

Timeline

  1. 1996–2009

    Harvard, NYU and Montreal postdoc

    He begins working on artificial intelligence research in 1996 and earns an AB in computer science cum laude from Harvard University in 2001. In 2007, he completes a computer science PhD on machine learning and natural language processing at New York University, where he defends his dissertation, “Constituent Parsing by Classification,” advised by I. Dan Melamed. In 2009, he works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Université de Montréal, studying deep learning methods with Professor Yoshua Bengio.

  2. 2010

    A paper on word representations

    In 2010, he, Lev-Arie Ratinov and Yoshua Bengio publish “Word Representations: A Simple and General Method for Semi-Supervised Learning” at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Uppsala, Sweden.

  3. 2011

    Heading MetaOptimize LLC

    In 2011, he heads MetaOptimize LLC, a consultancy focused on data monetization, predictive analytics, business intelligence, data mining, natural language processing and machine learning.

  4. 2013–2015

    Co-founding Upshot and joining Workday

    With Thomas Kim, he founds Upshot in September 2013 and builds an NLP-based mobile enterprise data analytics app for Salesforce users that wins the Salesforce1 Hackathon’s $1 million prize in 2013. In February 2015, Workday acquires Upshot, and Turian joins Workday along with Kim and first employee Alex Nisnevich.

  5. 2020

    Test-of-Time Award and language grounding

    The ACL Test-of-Time Award goes to his 2010 paper with Lev-Arie Ratinov and Yoshua Bengio at ACL 2020. In November 2020, he coauthors “Experience Grounds Language” at EMNLP, arguing that language understanding research must relate language to the physical world and social interactions.

  6. 2021

    Torchsynth and the synth1B1 corpus

    In April 2021, he coauthors a paper that introduces torchsynth, an open-source GPU modular synthesizer, and releases synth1B1, a multi-modal audio corpus of one billion four-second synthesized sounds paired with their synthesis parameters.

  7. 2021–2022

    The HEAR audio benchmark

    HEAR launches as a NeurIPS 2021 shared challenge and appears as a 2022 paper coauthored by Turian. Its benchmark suite evaluates audio representations across speech, environmental sound and music, testing 29 models from 13 external teams on 19 downstream tasks across 16 datasets.

  8. As of October 2026

    CEO and co-founder of noc0

    He is CEO and co-founder of noc0, working in deep learning, natural language processing and audio AI.

Career

  1. Nownoc0CEO and co-founder
  2. From 2015Workday
  3. 2013–2015UpshotCo-founder
  4. Université de MontréalPostdoctoral Research Fellow

Education

  1. Harvard UniversityAB
  2. New York University

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Université de Montréal. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Université de Montréal. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  3. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Université de Montréal. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  4. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Université de Montréal. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Joseph Turian | BIL Conference bilconference.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Joseph Turian | Berlin Buzzwords 2011 - Search, Store, Scale 2011.berlinbuzzwords.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. NYU Computer Science Department cs.nyu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Word Representations: A Simple and General Method for Semi-Supervised Learning aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Workday Acquires Upshot, Strengthens Data Science Expertise blog.workday.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Announcement of the 2020 ACL Test-of-Time Awards (ToT) aclweb.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Experience Grounds Language - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. One Billion Audio Sounds from GPU-enabled Modular Synthesis arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. HEAR: Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Customers · Argos argos-ci.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. turian (Joseph Turian) · GitHub github.com. Checked 22 October 2026.