CV

Education

Ph.D. in Physics (All but defense), Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA (1992–1997)
Thesis: Aspects of M-Theory — M-Theory and string-string duality, enhanced gauge symmetry, generalized topological sigma model (hep-th/9601102, hep-th/9608113, hep-th/9703113).
B.S. in Mathematics, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA, USA (1988–1992)
Thesis: Scattering of Gravitational Shock Waves in String Theory.

Employment

Co-Founder / CEO, Coqui, Berlin, Germany (2020–2023)
Led strategy, fundraising ($3.3M), and product. Coqui TTS (Tortoise, VITS, XTTS), Coqui Studio (generative AI voices, cloning, fusion). Best open-source TTS (2M+ downloads/month, 40K+ GitHub stars). Languages: Python, C++, JavaScript. Tech: TensorFlow, PyTorch.
Manager, Machine Learning Group, Mozilla, Berlin, Germany (2016–2020)
Strategy, finance, partnerships, and technical leadership. Projects: Deep Speech (WER 5.97% LibriSpeech clean), Mozilla TTS (Tacotron, Tacotron2, MelGAN, etc.), Common Voice, Snakepit, DSAlign. Principal investigator for Bergamot (NMT, 3M€), Papa Reo (7.4M€), SIFIS-Home (5M€), NSF internships. Languages: Python, C++, JavaScript. Tech: TensorFlow, PyTorch.
Senior Software Engineer, Mozilla, Berlin, Germany (2015–2016)
Personal assistant for Firefox OS, Web Speech API, PocketSphinx, MaryTTS. Languages: C++, JavaScript.
Director of Machine Learning, So1, Berlin, Germany (2013–2015)
ML for retail/coupon targeting: benchmarking, deep learning (Pylearn2), collaborative filtering (PREA, GraphLab/GraphChi), build and CI. Languages: R, C++, Java, Python, Scala.
Founder / CTO, forty.to, Berlin, Germany (2011–2013)
Natural language interface to knowledge. UIMA++ (parallel NLP platform), QAServer, iOS/Chrome QA apps. Languages: C, C++, Objective C.
Senior Software Engineer, mentalimages/NVIDIA, Berlin, Germany (2004–2011)
3D rendering: DiCE, neuray, RealityServer (C++/JavaScript APIs). Languages: C, C++, JavaScript.
Research Programmer, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Golm, Germany (2002–2004)
Grid Application Toolkit (GAT), GridLab. Languages: C, Java, C++.
Senior Software Engineer, Semantic Edge, Berlin, Germany (2001–2002)
NLU/NLG: Knowledge Manager (abductive translation to SQL), Dialog IDE. Languages: Java, Prolog.

Grants

Horizon 2020 — SIFIS-Home (2020–2023): 5M€, PI for Mozilla; secure open IoT for homes.
New Zealand Strategic Science Investment Fund — Papa Reo (2019–2026): 13M NZD (7.4M€), PI for Mozilla; NLP for te reo Māori.
Horizon 2020 — Bergamot (2019–2021): 3M€, PI for Mozilla; client-side NMT in Firefox.
NSF INTERN (2018–2019): Intern funding for low-resource STT research.

Fellowships

Patricia Harris Fellow, U.S. Department of Education (1993–1996)
GAANN Fellow, U.S. Department of Education (1992–1993)

Skills

Languages: Python, C++, JavaScript, R, Java, Scala, C, Objective C, Prolog
Technologies: TensorFlow, PyTorch, deep learning (TTS, ASR, NMT), NLP, grid/HPC, 3D rendering
Platforms: Linux, Windows, OS X

Publications

Gödel’s Poetry

Kelly Davis. (2025). "Gödel's Poetry." arXiv Pre-print.

XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Model

Edresson Casanova, Kelly Davis, Eren Gölge, Görkem Göknar, Iulian Gulea, Logan Hart, Aya Aljafari, Joshua Meyer, Reuben Morais, Samuel Olayemi, Julian Weber. (2024). "XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Model." INTERSPEECH 2024.

Interpreting Pretrained Contextualized Representations via Reductions to Static Embeddings

Rishi Bommasani, Kelly Davis, Claire Cardie. (2020). "Interpreting Pretrained Contextualized Representations via Reductions to Static Embeddings." ACL 2020.

Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus

Rosana Ardila, Megan Branson, Kelly Davis, Michael Henretty, Michael Kohler, Josh Meyer, Reuben Morais, Lindsay Saunders, Francis M. Tyers, Gregor Weber. (2020). "Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus." LREC 2020.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud vs Andrews–Curtis Conjecture

Kelly Davis. (2014). "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud vs Andrews–Curtis Conjecture." Work in progress.

Axiomatic TQFT, Axiomatic DQFT, and Exotic 4-Manifolds

Kelly Davis. (2011). "Axiomatic TQFT, Axiomatic DQFT, and Exotic 4-Manifolds." Quantum Topology (submitted).

GAT: Towards Generic and Easy Application Programming Interfaces for the Grid

Gabrielle Allen, Kelly Davis, Tom Goodale, Andrei Hutanu, Hartmut Kaiser, Thilo Kielmann, André Merzky, Rob van Nieuwpoort, Alexander Reinefeld, Florian Schintke, Thorsten Schütt, Ed Seidel, Brygg Ullmer. (2005). "GAT: Towards Generic and Easy Application Programming Interfaces for the Grid." Proceedings of the IEEE. 93(3), 534–550.

Enabling Applications on the Grid: A GridLab Overview

Gabrielle Allen, Kelly Davis, Konstantinos N. Dolkas, Nikolaos D. Doulamis, Tom Goodale, Thilo Kielmann, André Merzky, Jarek Nabrzyski, Juliusz Pukacki, Thomas Radke, Michael Russell, Ed Seidel, John Shalf, Ian Taylor. (2003). "Enabling Applications on the Grid: A GridLab Overview." Int. J. High Per. Comp. App..