​​Intern – Speech Processing / ASR for Low-Resource Languages​

Summary

Leidos is an industry and technology leader serving government and commercial customers. They are seeking a Technical Intern to support research and development efforts in speech processing for low-resource languages, focusing on audio enhancement and automatic speech recognition (ASR). The intern will assist in developing prototype pipelines and analyzing noisy audio data.

Responsibilities

• Support Leidos engineers and researchers in defining tasks, workflows, and integration requirements
• Assist with designing and implementing a prototype pipeline to transform noisy audio into data usable by downstream speech models
• Help preprocess, enhance, segment, and analyze noisy audio for low-resource language applications
• Run experiments, evaluate results, and document findings
• Prepare technical content and communicate progress, challenges, and next steps in team meetings, design reviews, and technical exchanges
• Contribute to testing, prototyping, and iterative improvement of speech and audio processing workflows

Skills

• Current advanced undergraduate (rising junior or rising senior) or graduate student studying Computational Linguistics, Speech and Hearing Sciences, Acoustics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field
• Coursework, academic project experience, lab experience, or other hands-on experience in one or more of the following: speech processing, audio signal processing, machine learning, natural language processing, acoustic phonetics or a related area
• Experience programming in Python through coursework, research, projects, or internships
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical results clearly
• U.S. Citizenship required
• Coursework, project work, or research experience in one or more of the following: audio enhancement, speech activity detection, speaker diarization, speaker identification, ASR, or low-resource language technologies
• Familiarity with speech, audio, or machine learning tools and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, torchaudio, Kaldi, ESPnet, SpeechBrain, Hugging Face, or similar
• Experience working with noisy, conversational, far-field, or otherwise real-world audio data
• Familiarity with data preparation, annotation workflows, corpus curation, or model bootstrapping approaches
• Familiarity with AWS or other cloud-based development environments
• Publications, class projects, research posters, GitHub projects, or other demonstrable technical work in a relevant area

Qualifications

Must Haves

• Current advanced undergraduate (rising junior or rising senior) or graduate student studying Computational Linguistics, Speech and Hearing Sciences, Acoustics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field
• Coursework, academic project experience, lab experience, or other hands-on experience in one or more of the following: speech processing, audio signal processing, machine learning, natural language processing, acoustic phonetics or a related area
• Experience programming in Python through coursework, research, projects, or internships
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical results clearly
• U.S. Citizenship required

Nice to Haves

• Coursework, project work, or research experience in one or more of the following: audio enhancement, speech activity detection, speaker diarization, speaker identification, ASR, or low-resource language technologies
• Familiarity with speech, audio, or machine learning tools and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, torchaudio, Kaldi, ESPnet, SpeechBrain, Hugging Face, or similar
• Experience working with noisy, conversational, far-field, or otherwise real-world audio data
• Familiarity with data preparation, annotation workflows, corpus curation, or model bootstrapping approaches
• Familiarity with AWS or other cloud-based development environments
• Publications, class projects, research posters, GitHub projects, or other demonstrable technical work in a relevant area

Benefits

• Health and Wellness programs
• Income Protection
• Paid Leave
• Retirement