Recent content on Evan King
Summary 
 I’m a research engineer and applied scientist specializing in AI under extreme resource constraints — from GameCube-class satellite processors at the Air Force Research Laboratory to LLM-powered smart environments and speech recognition systems on microcontrollers. 
 I hold a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Two of my three…
TL;DR: I’m launching the Engram, a hardware sampler that generates new sounds in real-time using embedded generative audio models. It combines traditional sampling with voice control and audio “model bending”, giving musicians new ways to explore and create unique sounds. 
 Contact me or sign up as a tester to help shape Engram’s future. EDIT: The call for testers is…
TL;DR: I built a tool for assembling Dadaist poems from ASR transcriptions of misheard speech, and you can play with it in your web browser . I built it with my MoonshineJS library, Tone.js , and p5js . 
 
 Introduction 
 My goal lately has been to build a JS library for simple on-device speech recognition in web applications. While there are many practical uses for this, I felt the…
An ePaper display shows the most common words overheard from nearby conversations. 
 I wrapped up my PhD recently. It’s in “Electrical and Computer Engineering”, though it’s more descriptive to say that I spent my four years of graduate school working in “Ubiquitous Computing” or ubicomp . Ubicomp researchers aim to make technology that “fit[s] the…
Moonshine outperforms speech-to-text models from OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, and Meta on the OpenASR Leaderboard while running 5x faster 1 on edge devices. 
 I built the data collection and preprocessing pipelines that we used to train Moonshine, delivering over 200K hours of labeled data. We needed a LOT of good data, and we had to move fast. The pipeline I constructed was massively distributed,…

 What if smart devices could reason about their state, like a thermostat that explains its schedule, or a light bulb that chooses a color to suit a mood? 
 That’s the subject of my IEEE PerCom ‘25 paper, “Teaching Things To Think: Bootstrapping Local Reasoning for Smart(er) Devices”. We proposed a method for synthesizing training data to distill small language…
Building on my weekend project to control some smart lights with ChatGPT, this wide-ranging paper fully introduces LLM-based reasoning to multi-device smart home environments. We introduce methods and benchmarks for measuring model performance at reasoning in smart homes, propose methods for engineering immediate and scheduled responses to user goals, propose a multi-step reasoning system for…
One of my favorite pieces of music hardware is a 4-track TASCAM Porta 03 mkII tape recorder that I acquired back in ~2013. Having grown up with a DAW, I’d gotten the itch to record music with some self-imposed creative limitations, and a coworker at the time kindly gifted it to me (thanks Carol, if you’re out there). Though I’ve yet to use it for producing any full songs, it has…
Featured on KUTX Song of the Day, November 2023 
 “The Sky Doesn’t End at the Top of the Page” is a euphoric, genre-hopping exploration of the way our mental models of the world develop—or cease to develop—as we age. 
 The album’s title recalls a childhood epiphany–the kind that so firmly demarcates iterations of our understanding of the world that we retain a memory of it long into…
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) can be useful for forming ad-hoc networks between smart devices, and for exchanging information in sensor networks. It’s difficult, however, to choose the right settings for the BLE protocols that devices use to discover one another. The optimal protocol effectively balances discovery latency and packet reception rates with the energy consumed by sending and…

 
 
 
 
 
 Shot on Fujifilm Superia 400 with a Canon T50 camera in Sonora, CA and Half Moon Bay, CA.
2024 UPDATE 
 I originally authored this post in early 2023 — little did I know it would be the spark of a broader research project, ultimately becoming a significant part of my PhD dissertation. If you are the researchy type, you can read the short 2023 preprint paper and/or the in-depth 2024 ACM IMWUT paper I published and presented at UbiComp 2024 about this topic. We also made a demo…
A daily-updated timelapse of my pothos plant. 
 While I’ve cared for (and killed) a variety of different houseplants over the years, pothos plants are probably my favorite. They are incredibly hardy, easy to propogate from clippings, and they grow quickly. I’ve always been curious to learn a bit more about how these plants maneuver as they grow, so I decided to set up an automated…
“My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread” is a cozy, hazy art-pop exploration of the interplay between everyday human life and the natural world. I released this EP as Olivia Nowadays in 2022 along with my friend and collaborator, Kent Carson. 
 Blending field recordings with lush instrumentation, warm rhythms, and lyrics imbued with the whimsy of magical realism, the five songs on MPAHOBAT dip…
Featured in Bandcamp’s New and Notable, December 2021 
 A series of experimentations by my collaborator Kent Carson and I with a trove of recordings we’d gathered during travels abroad ultimately became the genesis of our musical project and pseudonym Alex Green: an outlet for sonic collages of synth textures, found sounds, and fluid input from collaborators that form a proxy for…

 Shot on Fujifilm Superia 400 with a Canon T50 camera in Canyon Lake, TX. 
 
 
 
 
 Shot on Kodak Portra 800 with a Canon T50 camera in Austin, TX during the winter storm that caused the 2021 Texas power crisis .
Eurorack is an open format for modular synthesizers —hardware-based audio devices that enable you to craft compositions (called “patches”) by routing voltage signals between different modules. Some modules produce sound, others only produce voltages that you can use to build rhythms, melodies, etc. It’s a highly-flexible way of creating music: one that rewards…
Data sonification describes the process by which data is translated into sound. There’s a variety of reasons this might be worthwhile, from purely artistic or aesthetic purposes to its potential as an assistive technology for the visually impaired. I like to think of it as synesthesia: it allows us to experience information in a different modality than it was originally expressed. 
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 Shot with a Yashica Electro 35 rangefinder camera around Okinawa, Japan.
I ordered an RFID reader recently for an undergraduate project under the impression it would act like a keyboard emulator, sitting in a waiting state and outputting scanned tags to the keyboard buffer as they came in range. I found, however, that what I bought was actually just a reader/scanner for checking and writing new RFID tags – not for actively scanning them as a check-out station or…