Hello! My name is Wilson Wongso, a Machine Learning Engineer who started his PhD at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, 🇦🇺 Australia. My fields of interest include low-resource Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Language Processing (SLP).
On the side, I am a Machine Learning Engineer at Bookbot. I lead a small team of two and our work focuses on automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, audio classification, conversational AI, and many more.
I am also an independent researcher at Lazarus NLP. We work on open-source language models for languages of 🇮🇩 Indonesia. Our main goal is to revive the dying languages of Indonesia through speech and language technology. Our most recent publication is titled NusaBERT: Teaching IndoBERT to be Multilingual and Multicultural.
Before all of this, I was mainly an esports content writer at Hybrid Indonesia where I discuss competitive gaming, professional players & teams, do interviews, and occasionally mix a little machine learning in my writing. You can view my articles on Notion.
Academic History
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Candidate
UNSW Sydney (2024-present)
Research Topic: GenAISim: Simulation in the Loop for Multi-Stakeholder Interactions with Generative Agents
ADM+S Centre Scholarship Recipient
Supervisor: Professor Flora Salim (CRUISE-UNSW)
Bachelor of Computer Science (S.Kom.)
Binus University (2019-2023)
Graduated with GPA: 3.99
Thesis: Many-to-Many Multilingual Translation Model for Languages of Indonesia
Advisor: Dr. Ir. Derwin Suhartono, S.Kom., M.T.I.
Study Abroad, Information Technology
Monash University Australia (2022-2023)
GPA: 4.00 – WAM: 94.0
Awards
- 2024: Judges (1st) Prize ($5000 Research Project Grant) - ADM+S Hackathon 2024: Recommender Systems for Public Service Media
- 2024: Judges Award ($1500 Research Grant) - HDR/ECR Poster Competition, 2024 ADM+S Symposium
- 2024: ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) Scholarship Recipient
- 2024: Received Tuition Fee Scholarship (TFS) for PhD Program, UNSW Sydney
- 2023: Best Graduate from Computer Science Program with Summa Cumlaude (3.99 GPA), Binus University 68th Graduation
- 2023: Highest grade for Semester 2, 2022 in FIT1045 Algorithms and Programming Fundamentals in Python (Monash University)
- 2022: Binus University Appreciation Day Awardee: Student Achievement International Level Greater Jakarta
- 2022: Binus University Global Class Scholarship Program: Study Abroad - Monash University Australia
- 2022: Best Presenter of ICACSIS Session #12 Natural Language Processing
- 2019: Kairos Gracia Christian Junior College: Kairos Gracia Award
Latest Blog Posts
Predicting Phonemes with BERT Our team at Bookbot is currently developing a grapheme-to-phoneme Python package for Bahasa Indonesia. The package is highly inspired by its English counterpart, g2p. A lot of our design and methods are borrowed from that library, most notably the steps to predict phonemes.
My HuggingFace JAX Community Week Experience On June 23, the HuggingFace team announced that they are planning to host a community week together with the people from the Google Cloud team.
Recent Projects
Indonesian Transformer Language Models Various Transformer-based language models trained on mostly Indonesian-related corpora. Powered by HuggingFace, PyTorch & Python.
Gamma A self reminder React Native app that includes a todo list, event countdowns, bible reading plan, and book library. Powered by React Native, Firebase & JavaScript.
Curated Articles
School Curriculum: Indonesian National vs. Cambridge International As I enter my freshman year in university, I’m gradually exposed to more people and their various backgrounds. The more I chat with my new friends, the more I get to understand one major difference that I’ve overlooked all this time – a school’s curriculum.
The Absurd and Ironic Indonesian Reading Culture While a lot of people abroad are racing to read hundreds of books per year, the Indonesian people are famous for having one of the world’s lowest reading interests. This peculiarity is not only concerning to many but also represents a huge irony for a country whose people are immensely active in day-to-day social media activities.
How MOBA Games Killed My Fear of Math Like many young kids growing up, I hated mathematics. The subject to me seemed blurry, scary, full of large quantities, and looked like I could never catch up to my peers who were excelling in elementary school. More often than not, I will also hear a couple of my schoolmates who argued that this subject is utterly useless in the real world, their most favorite catchphrase being: “why do we even study this?”
M2 World Championship Playoffs Analyses: A Tale of Twists and Turns After weeks of preparation, quarantine session, and a great show of team fighting skills, the M2 World Championship has finally come to an end, crowning the latest, world’s best team in Mobile Legends Bang Bang. More importantly, M2 marks the end of an era for multiple recurring themes, ranging from the newly crowned champions to those who retired with a quite bitter aftertaste.
Esports Franchising in Nations with Developing Mobile Esports Scene Esports is one of the most attractive and popular fields to hop into in recent years. It has proven its worth and the amount of attention it gets even from the mainstream public. To a few, esports is merely forming teams and playing as five, but it gets more serious than that. Esports has formed its very own ecosystem outside of casual gaming, and the two realms seem to be growing in their own separate ways.
One-Tap Potential: Jason “f0rsakeN” Susanto’s Youthful Esports Pursuit When we think of esports athletes, we tend to think of relatively older players who either have dropped out of school to chase their dreams or be semi-responsible for their academic lives. More often than not, it’s tempting to play games over doing homework, since most of us probably dislike the idea of not having fun.