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Dr Cătălina Cangea

Senior Research Scientist

Google DeepMind

Biography

I am a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind with a background in machine learning, computer science and competitive programming. I love doing purposeful work that helps others! My focus is on music generation, finding useful signals in large datasets and human evaluation studies. I’ve been an audio and music ML enthusiast since 2015 and am thrilled to be developing tools that enable music enthusiasts of all expertise levels to learn about, engage with and make their own music!

Outside work, I love cycling, rowing, travelling, playing/recording the piano/guitar and chasing my favourite bands on tour. 🎼 I sometimes write poetry and lyrics for (ever-)future songs :)

Interests

  • Music generation
  • ML tools for music creativity
  • Multimodal long-range generation (audio, music, language)

Education

  • PhD in Machine Learning, 2021

    University of Cambridge

  • MPhil in Advanced Computer Science, 2017

    University of Cambridge

  • BA in Computer Science, 2016

    University of Cambridge

News

Miles beyond thrilled to announce our work on music generative models - Lyria, Dream Track and Music AI tools. Happy to have contributed to both fan engagement and creative exploration avenues, as (1) GDM tech lead for the model quality workstream leading up to the Dream Track launch and (2) core contributor to Lyria and Music AI tools, via identifying useful data signals, adding model capabilities and assessing them via human evaluation studies. Humbled by the fantastic artists who are supporting the Dream Track experiment in YouTube Shorts - check out what shorts they and the 100 creators have uploaded here - and immensely grateful for the Artist Incubator participants, who have been giving us plenty of insights and feedback for developing the Music AI tools!

Our intern’s project got published in TMLR - congratulations Jannik Kossen for leading this and for a successful internship in summer 2022 at DeepMind!

After 1 year and 7 months at DeepMind, I am now a Senior Research Scientist! Grateful for the support of my manager and for all my bright collaborators!

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Senior Research Scientist

Google DeepMind

May 2023 – Present London, UK

2024: One of 3 representatives for the generative music effort. Attributions include soliciting research ideas, planning projects, enabling 2-way communication between leadership and team members, research and product workstreams, maintaining both research and product momentum and running recurring team meetings. Research on model controls and finetuning. Technical and product demos for a variety of stakeholders, internal and external.

2023: Core contributor to Lyria and Music AI tools. GDM tech lead for one of the Youtube Shorts Dream Track launch workstreams, coordinating with several YouTube teams.

 
 
 
 
 

Research Scientist

DeepMind

Oct 2021 – Apr 2023 London, UK
Part of the Deep Learning team, working on multimodal learning and generative methods for long-range sequential data. Have so far co-led several research projects, published at ICML 2022 and hosted an RS intern whose work got accepted to the Foundation Models for Decision Making Workshop (NeurIPS 2022). External mentoring at EEML 2022 and LOGML 2022.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Scientist Intern

DeepMind

Jul 2020 – Nov 2020 Cambridge, UK (remote)
Hosted by Piotr Mirowski, in the Robotics, Embodied Agents and Lifelong learning (REAL) team.
 
 
 
 
 

Consultant

Relation Therapeutics

Jun 2020 – Jul 2020 Cambridge, UK (remote)
Developing (graph-)ML solutions to aid in drug development and repurposing efforts.
 
 
 
 
 

AI Resident

X, the moonshot factory

May 2019 – Aug 2019 Mountain View, California
Worked on a real-world challenging problem - accurately tracking changes in code across different versions - using and adapting state-of-the-art ML techniques. Patent Code change graph node matching with machine learning now available.
 
 
 
 
 

Reviewer

Conferences and workshops

Nov 2018 – Sep 2021
Reviewer for ICML 2020 (was awarded a Top Reviewer Certificate of Appreciation), NeurIPS 2020, BMVC 2020 and WiML 2018, RLGM 2019, LRGR 2019, GRL 2019, ViGIL 2019, GRL+ 2020, ViGIL 2021 (also co-organising).
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Mila

Jul 2018 – Sep 2018 Montréal, Canada
Collaboration with Aaron Courville on a visual reasoning project involving a novel benchmark and alternative perspective on EQA-style tasks. Work published at BMVC 2019 and presented as a spotlight talk at the ViGIL NeurIPS workshop.
 
 
 
 
 

Machine Learning Teaching Fellow

Cambridge Spark

May 2018 – May 2021 Cambridge, UK
Teaching the Neural Networks module from the Applied Data Science London Bootcamp to industry professionals.
 
 
 
 
 

Admissions Interviewer

University of Cambridge

Dec 2016 – Dec 2017 Cambridge, UK
Undergraduate admissions interviews for the Computer Science Tripos, in Murray Edwards College (Dec 2016) and King’s College (Dec 2017).
 
 
 
 
 

Supervisor

University of Cambridge

Oct 2016 – Jun 2021 Cambridge, UK

Master’s research projects: Structure-aware Generation of Molecules in Protein Pockets (Pavol Drotar, 2020-21) (92100) (presented at NeurIPS MLSB), Machine Unlearning (Mukul Rathi, 2020-21) (91100), Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning in the Presence of an Adversary (Carlos Purves, 2019-20) (87100), Representation Learning for Spatio-Temporal Graphs (Felix Opolka, 2018-19) (85100) (presented at ICLR RLGM), Dynamic Temporal Analysis for Graph Structured Data (Aaron Solomon, 2018-19) (presented at ICLR RLGM)

Computer Science Tripos Part II projects: Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks using Wikipedia (Péter Mernyei, 2019-20, Novel Applications spotlight talk at ICML GRL+), Multimodal Relational Reasoning for Visual Question Answering (Aaron Tjandra, 2019-20), The PlayStation Reinforcement Learning Environment (Carlos Purves, 2018-19) (80100) (presented at NeurIPS Deep RL), Deep Learning for Music Recommendation (Andrew Wells, 2017-18) (76100).

Undergraduate courses for Murray Edwards, King’s, and Queens’ Colleges: AI, Databases, Discrete Mathematics, Foundations of Computer Science, Logic and Proof, Machine Learning and Real-world Data.

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer Intern

Facebook

Jun 2016 – Sep 2016 London, UK
LogDevice team. I optimised client operations on a RocksDB database and implemented a new API required by another team in Facebook.
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer Intern

Facebook

Jul 2015 – Sep 2015 New York, USA
iOS Product Infrastructure Team. I worked towards delivering a better experience for users of the Facebook iOS app. My project aimed to reduce the time taken to load content close to the area currently being viewed on screen, by improving the prioritization system for network requests.
 
 
 
 
 

STEP Intern

Google

Jun 2014 – Sep 2014 Zurich, Switzerland
YouTube Uploads team. I added processing progress for video uploads on several YouTube pages, as the Upload page was the only one displaying this information.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Text-and-audio methods

An overview of text-and-audio methods that supports the Multimodal Learning module in R255.

Music AI Tools @ NeurIPS

A live demo of our ongoing work on Music AI tools; more info here.

Autoregressive long-context music generation with Perceiver AR

A talk on our recently-published general-purpose architecture, Perceiver AR, and why long context matters when processing real-world …

Accomplishments

Promotion

After 1 year and 7 months at DeepMind, I am officially a Senior Research Scientist (now at Google DeepMind!) - grateful for the support of my manager and my bright collaborators!

Top Reviewer Certificate of Appreciation

The Top Reviewer Certificate of Appreciation acknowledges ‘excellent service as a reviewer for ICML 2020’, awarded by the Program and General chairs.

Wiseman Award

The award acknowledges those who make a commendable contribution to the work of the Department, going above and beyond the requirements of their course or project.

Travel Grant

Travel award to attend the Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) Workshop at NeurIPS 2018.

Travel Grant

Partial funding for travelling to NeurIPS 2018 and presenting my poster at the WiML workshop.

MPhil Graduation Prize

Awarded for obtaining a Distinction in the MPhil degree.

Master of Philosophy in Advanced Computer Science

Graduated with Distinction.

Bronze Medal

Won 3rd place at the Hack Cambridge MLH hackathon, as part of team facejack.

Rosemary Murray Scholarship

Awarded for obtaining a First Class result in Part II of the Computer Science Tripos.

Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science

First Class honours in final year.

Paula Browne Scholarship

Received the scholarship every year during my undergraduate degree. The scholarship was given to only one other student in my year.

Silver Medal

Awarded for obtaining 10th place at the National phase of the Olympiad during 10th grade.

Special Prize for Best Writing Style

Awarded for obtaining the highest score on the essay that was part of the written task.

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