jonathan starck

synthesia

The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. In the run up to our 8th annual event on June 14th 2024 in London, we’re running a series of speaker profiles to shed more light on what you can expect to learn on the day!

At RAAIS we have a focus on translating cutting edge technology and research into production-grade products for real-world problems.

Jonathan Starck is the Chief Technology Officer of Synthesia, a company pioneering the use of generative AI to create photo-real videos of people. Founded in 2017, long before the current boom in text to video, Synthesia’s systems are trained on large datasets of human footage to create realistic lip-syncing, speech synthesis, body movements, and facial expressions for synthetic avatars. This allows for scalable video creation without the need for actors or filming. 

Synthesia is trusted by leading global enterprises, including Accenture, Heineken, Microsoft and Zoom for use cases ranging from training and customer service to marketing. 

Prior to joining Synthesia, Jonathan was Head of Research at Foundry, whose software is used by every major feature film studio for visual effects and animation. He previously held academic positions at the University of Surrey, where he specialized in computer vision and graphics. He holds a PhD from Surrey in Multiple View Geometry, along with a Masters in Engineering from the University of Cambridge.