Prof. David Harel Group Department of Computer Science & Applied Mathematics

About

I am an MSc student in the Prosodic Lab advised by Prof. David Harel. My research focuses on emotional speech synthesis, fine‑tuning open TTS backbones (WhisperSpeech) for controllable affect and voice cloning. I also explore prosody‑preserving data augmentation and interpretability for vision transformers.

Education

  • M.Sc., Mathematics & Computer Science (AI/ML/CV track), Weizmann Institute of Science — GPA 93.3.
  • Computer Science Teaching Certificate, Weizmann Institute of Science — GPA 100.
  • B.Sc. Computer Science, Ben‑Gurion University of the Negev — summa cum laude, GPA 93.37 (rank 5/249).

Experience

  • AI Researcher, Prosodic Lab (Weizmann), 2023–present — WESS: Whisper‑based Emotional Speech Synthesis.
  • Research projects, Weizmann, 2022–2023 — Prosody augmentation with Whisper; OCT‑Transformer interpretability.
  • Software Developer, Israel Police (GIS), 2017–2018 — Large‑scale data pipelines PostgreSQL/MSSQL→Elasticsearch.

Awards & Highlights

  • Yearly excellence certificates (BGU, 2019–2021).
  • Outstanding Student awards (Ministry of Education, 2014–2017).

Skills

Python, C/C++/C#, Java, Git, AWS, SQL, Elasticsearch, Whisper, Transformers, EnCodec/Vocos, ECAPA‑TDNN.