Frenk Dragar Completed His Research Visit at Berkeley

Frenk Dragar, ASEF Fellow 2023 has just completed his research visit at the Speech & Computation Lab at the University of California, Berkeley under the mentorship of Dr. Gašper Beguš.

Frenk worked on the problem of watermarking AI model outputs, specifically on generative speech models. There is a concern for misuse and spam because of the growing capability of generative models – can you tell if a piece of text was written by ChatGPT or by a human, or an audio clip actually spoken by a person? Watermarking is one method that can help with the detection of generated content and prevention of misuse of such models, by embedding hidden signals into the content itself, which is invisible to the observer, but can be detected if we have some extra information, such as a secret key.

During his free time, Frenk explored the bustling technology scene in the Bay Area, visiting some meetups, conferences and a hackathon around Berkeley, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Besides this, he experienced the howling of sea lions, wonderful landscapes at Sonoma and Napa Valley, both natural and architectural wonders such as Muir Woods’ giant redwood trees, Mount Tamalpais, the (often foggy) Golden Gate bridge and beautiful national parks such as Yosemite, Big Sur, Yoshua Tree and Grand Canyon.

The research visit was an amazing experience – the watermarking project will be expanded upon in Frenk’s MSc thesis at Utrecht University, as well as hopefully published as a conference paper. He would like to thank both his host Tony Hansen for his above and beyond hospitality, and mentor Gašper Beguš for his mentorship at the university – as well as a very hospitable, all-american Thanksgiving dinner.