PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ron J. Weiss

Also known as R.J. Weiss, Ron Weiss

Ron Weiss is an AI researcher whose work spans speech recognition, speech translation, speech synthesis, and audio editing. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering at Columbia in 2009, completed a postdoc at NYU, and worked at Google on speech and music systems including Translatotron, Parrotron, and Wave-Tacotron. He researched neural interfaces at Facebook Reality Labs, contributed to Google DeepMind's video-to-audio research in 2024, and coauthored Recomposer in 2025. He is a researcher at Google, a role he resumed in 2022.

Now at
Google
Works
76
Citations
85,120
h-index
43
Rankings
#85 by citations since 2021
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2009

    A Columbia PhD

    In 2009, he completes a PhD in electrical engineering at Columbia University and works in the Laboratory for the Recognition of Speech and Audio.

  2. By 2010

    Postdoc at NYU

    By 2010, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Music and Audio Research Laboratory at New York University.

  3. 2015

    Google speech and music research

    At the 2015 SANE workshop, he is a software engineer at Google working on content-based audio analysis, music recommendation, and noise-robust speech recognition.

  4. May 2019

    Translatotron speech translation

    In 2019, he coauthors Translatotron, a sequence-to-sequence model that translates speech directly between languages without intermediate text.

  5. July 2019

    Parrotron for atypical speech

    In 2019, he coauthors Parrotron, a neural network that converts atypical speech directly into fluent synthesized speech.

  6. 2021–2022

    Wave-Tacotron and neural interface

    In 2021, he coauthors Wave-Tacotron, a neural network that generates speech waveforms directly from text. From 2021 to 2022, he works as a research scientist at Facebook Reality Labs on a neural interface.

  7. 2024–2025

    Video-to-audio and Recomposer

    In 2024, he contributes to Google DeepMind's video-to-audio research, which uses video and text prompts to generate synchronized soundtracks. In 2025, he coauthors Recomposer, a text-guided system for editing sound events in complex scenes.

  8. Since 2022

    Researcher at Google

    He returns to Google as a researcher in 2022 and remains in the role as of October 2026.

Career

  1. Since 2022GoogleSoftware Engineer
  2. 2021–2022MetaResearch Scientist
  3. 2010–2011New York UniversityPostdoctoral Researcher
  4. 2006–2011Columbia University

Education

  1. 2009Columbia UniversityPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python2012 · 69,582 citationsWith Alexandre Passos, Bertrand Thirion, David Cournapeau, Fabian Pedregosa, Matthieu Brucher and Matthieu Perrot
  2. Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning Wavenet on MEL Spectrogram Predictions2018 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 2,744 citationsWith Yonghui Wu
  3. CNN architectures for large-scale audio classification2017 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 2,585 citationsWith Malcolm Slaney
  4. Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis2017 · Interspeech (USB) · 1,738 citationsWith Quoc Le, Samy Bengio and Yonghui Wu
  5. State-of-the-Art Speech Recognition with Sequence-to-Sequence Models2018 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 1,043 citationsWith Tara Sainath and Yonghui Wu

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Ron J. Weiss. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  2. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Ron J. Weiss. 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.
  3. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. SANE 2015 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast saneworkshop.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Introducing Translatotron: An End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation Model research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Parrotron: New Research into Improving Verbal Communication for People with Speech Impairments research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Ron J. Weiss research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Ron J Weiss alphaxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Generating audio for video — Google DeepMind deepmind.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Recomposer: Event-roll-guided generative audio editing arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Ron J Weiss — Lacuna lacuna.tiptreesystems.com. Checked 20 October 2026.