The Sound of Intelligent AI – Palo Alto Happy Hour
From real-time multilingual voice agents that translate and dub with perfect cultural accuracy to emotionally intelligent audio systems that detect tone, intent, and even unspoken context, the frontier of AI is expanding into the auditory world.
But building speech and audio AI is not just a modeling challenge. It requires massive advances in high-quality audio data, multimodal fusion, on-device inference, and real-world evaluation at scale.
Join Centific for an evening exploring the emerging stack powering the next generation of voice and audio intelligence.
Panelists:
Dr. Dinesh Manocha
Distinguished University Professor, UMD | Co-Developer of Audio and Music Flamingo (with NVIDIA); Co-Founder of Impulsonic | AAAI/AAAS/ACM/IEEE/NAI/WAS Fellow; Member of ACM SIGGRAPH & IEEE VR Academies
Dr. Alex Acero
Head of AI Incubation, Zoom | Former Siri Chief Scientist | NAE Member / IEEE Fellow
Dr. Tarun Pruthi
Engineering Manager, XR Audio, Meta Reality Labs | Former Amazon Lab126, Apple
Dr. Victor Barres
Researcher, Sierra | Research Lead of τ-Bench | PhD Computational Cognitive Neuroscience
Harshit Rajgarhria, Senior Manager of AI Research at Centific and ICML 2026 author whose MedMosaic benchmark is advancing medical audio reasoning will be panel moderator.
Agenda:
6:00 – 7:00: Cocktail Hour and Networking
7:00 – 7:05: Welcome and Introductions
7:05 - 7:15: Dr. Manocha's talk "Flexible and Open Audio-LLM Models" - GAMMA Lab UMD
7:15 – 8:00: Panel Discussion
8:00 – 8:05: Q&A
8:05 – 9:00: Networking and Cocktails
About our host: Centific helps model labs and enterprises build, train, deploy, and govern intelligent systems through high-quality data, human expertise, and end-to-end platforms that turn complexity into scalable, real-world impact. Learn more about Centific at www.centific.com.