Agne Kersyte
Applied Machine Learning Researcher
London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) - a leading global financial markets infrastructure and data provider. We are leaders in data and analytics; capital formation and trade execution; and clearing and risk management.
I create machine learning models that help people work more happily and efficiently. For example, my recent work includes making automatic speech recognition models that transcribe financial meetings! These meetings are always edited and checked by people, but the automatic speech recognition step means that people don't need to start typing what they hear from scratch - the initial transcript is already generated for them.
I love that my work is not about replacing people with technology, but rather about enabling people to work in tandem with it!
I don't think I have a very typical day at work to describe! Some days, I spend a lot of time doing research - reading scientific papers and/or looking through open source code repositories for finding and testing ideas. Other days, I spend time developing code to design and run experiments. Lately, more and more of my days involve creating and giving presentations about my team's technology and the vision that we have for decision makers across the business.
I never thought I would code for a living! I was always very Humanities-focused and really interested in languages. I've learnt English, Spanish, French, and a bit of Russian while at school, and my native language is Lithuanian! I went on to study Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh, where I studied Philosophy, Psychology and focused mostly on Linguistics. During my studies, one of my professors encouraged me to do a Masters in Speech and Language Processing - a degree that revolves around teaching coding and maths for speech and language technologies. I decided to go for it and I'm glad I did so! Transitioning from a Humanities-mindset to STEM was really hard, but also incredibly rewarding! After graduating with a Masters, I started working for a startup, specialising in automatic speech recognition for meetings. Recently, we became a part of LSEG.
I'm not really sure where my career will bring me. I am very passionate about promoting ethical development and use of technology. I want to see less bias in the models that we develop and I want the technology to be accessible to wider groups of people.
I live in Scotland and I love hill walking and cycling in the beautiful landscapes of the country. During the pandemic, I've learnt to sew and knit, which I love doing when I have a free moment! I've always loved reading and discussing books I've read, which lead me to join a local book club.
I'm not a fan of quotes. I think context is required for a lot of what we say and I find people's actions more inspirational than their speeches.