LauzHack, Sonos and Open Source. Meet Eric.
Originally from the Bay Area, Eric moved to Europe for something different. He came to EPFL for the Masters, where he co-founded LauzHack. After working at Snips/Sonos, he went back to EPFL for a PhD.
Studies PhD @ EPFL (ongoing), MSc SysCom @ EPFL ‘18, BSc Electrical Engineering @ Jacobs University Bremen ‘15
Industry Sonos, Snips, DSP Concepts, Fraunhofer IDMT
Student Orgs Co-founder @ LauzHack, Investment Analyst @ S2S Ventures
Origin San Francisco Bay Area
Links LinkedIn
Growing Up in the Heart of Silicon Valley
Where did you grow up and what was it like?
I grew up in Los Altos, in the middle of the Silicon Valley. Both my parents work in tech but I didn’t do anything remotely related to tech growing up, and I’m happy my parents didn’t push any of that on me. I played a lot of football (soccer) growing up. I really wanted to pursue a career in that, at least play in college. Obviously it didn’t work out, but playing at that competitive level developed a lot of discipline in me. And I think that’s something that characterizes the Silicon Valley — a very competitive and focused environment, which can be good and bad.
Leaving San Francisco for Europe
How did your high school experience influence your decision to study in Germany for university?
Growing up, I often felt out of place. My parents are from India and Argentina/Italy, and I grew up in California, which I guess makes me a fourth culture kid if that’s a thing? And even with the Bay Area being very international, it was hard for me to fit in. Most people just saw me as Indian, and assumed I did what other kids of Indian heritage do. I really resented that, which unfortunately made me ashamed of my Indian heritage when growing up.
When I was 16, I got a full scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Mexico called UWC-USA. I only applied because I got a bad knee injury which put playing football on hold. I had a really good feeling about UWC and decided to accept the offer, pretty much stopping competitive football altogether. Going to UWC really shaped the person I am today. With just 200 students from over 80 countries, I met other people who also came from diverse backgrounds and I felt at home in this international setting. There was no norm in this community, everyone came with a unique story. And I learned to be proud of my whole multi-cultural background, and not just cherry-pick the parts I thought were “cool”. That gave me a lot of confidence for later on in life.
When I came to the point of deciding where to go for university, I knew I wanted to continue being in such an environment, but that doesn’t compartmentalize that diversity. Also, I knew I wanted to study abroad at one point during my studies. I was very close to going to UCLA, but a visit for prospective students put me off. At one point in the visit, they half-joked, “engineering students go one way and athletes go the other way”. It was a small remark, but it left me with a strong impression. I thought: “Sure UCLA is well-known, but do I want to go to a place where paths are so rigidly set?” Another option was a little-known university in Germany — Jacobs University Bremen — where quite a few people from my high school went to. I never visited the place, but had a feeling that it would have a similar vibe as UWC, even though it was a continent and an ocean away. Luckily it was the case, and at Jacobs I got to do so much more than just study engineering, like playing football in the university team, working in the student bar, and playing in a jazz band.
Having grown up in the Silicon Valley, what made you decide to stay in Europe rather than return?
A lot of people ask me “you’re from Silicon Valley, why are you here instead of there, where we all want to go?” I’ve made my personal choice that I prefer living in Europe. I would for sure encourage others to go to the Bay Area, and I did have a second shot at it with an internship at a startup called DSP Concepts during my masters at EPFL. The work was really great, but outside of work, I much prefer the lifestyle in Europe. In Silicon Valley, everything’s about tech, it’s a monoculture. But that density of talent and tech is also why there’s so much innovation and many startups coming out of there. That contagious energy and willingness to take risks and think big (but practically) is something very unique over there. So if you are ambitious and driven, you should definitely go there, for the network and the experience. I can definitely say that the startup I was at helped open doors for my future career in audio signal processing.
But I still decided to stay in Europe - maybe because I wanted a more balanced and varied life, which convinced me to stay.
Studying in Germany, Switzerland and research in Signal Processing
You started with Electrical Engineering in your bachelors at Jacobs University, then moved to signal processing (SysCom) in your masters & PhD at EPFL? What interests you about this field?
Who really knows what they want to study when they enter university? There are those people that have been coding since the age of six, but I wasn’t one of them. I picked Electrical Engineering (EE) because I wanted to study something around math and physics. And I picked EE, instead of something like CS, because I actually wanted to avoid programming!
Signal processing is a core subject in EE, and I started having courses in it during my second year. I found it super interesting how so many things could be manipulated and analyzed digitally, in particular audio which I was really interested in.
And then that’s what got me really hooked on programming. When you find something you really enjoy, programming is essentially just a language for you to explore that application in a digital way.
What I really like about signal processing is this link between the real/analog world and the digital world. It could be in speech/audio like I was doing before, ultrasound imaging which I also worked on during my masters, or lensless imaging like I’m working on now. One advantage of working in CS and signal processing is we can shift around so many domains.
So during my bachelor, I did internships in signal processing at Fraunhofer IDMT, and got to meet the guy who invented the MP3 algorithm!
For my masters, I wanted to go to a university that has more expertise in signal processing, and again found myself deciding between US (Stanford) or Europe (EPFL). I emailed professors at both universities, and my current supervisor at EPFL (Martin Vetterli) invited me to visit and eventually offered a part-time job in his lab. He later told me that what he found interesting in my profile, was that someone from California went to Germany to study.
Tell me about the research you’re doing now with lensless imaging.
What I find really cool about lensless imaging is that it throws away the whole notion of trying to replicate the human eye like traditional cameras do. You can view it as a way to give eyes to computers. So many pictures now are analyzed by machines, not humans. Lensless imaging throws away the constraints of classic lens design - you can give fresh eyes to computers in a new way. But it’s a very early technology with many challenges since it mixes hardware and software and is sensitive to specific settings.
I hope with my open source toolkit I can flatten as many of those hurdles as possible for others to try out or use this technology themselves. For industry, it gives another way of thinking about imaging beyond classic camera design. It’s never going to replace normal cameras, but can augment them in a similar way we have many sensors on our phones, and it’s interesting to see how consumer products can push technology, like the display tech in Apple’s Vision Pro potentially being used in lensless cameras. There are manys angles people look at it from — more compact imaging systems, 3D/high-dimensional imaging, or visual privacy-as-a-first layer of encryption.
Working at Snips & Sonos
You worked at some really cool places like Snips and Sonos after your masters. What was that experience like?
I got super lucky finding that job with Snips after my masters. The main reason I got it was because I was contributing to a popular open source package of our lab for audio signal processing and room simulation at EPFL (Pyroomacoustics).
On GitHub, I saw Snips was using this package and reached out to them saying I was interested in what they were doing. They didn’t have a job opening for what I wanted to do, but we talked and they said it would be cool to have me do audio signal processing. So pro tip - find open source projects, contribute to them, it really opens up career opportunities.
I first joined Snips as a tech evangelist, kind of linked to the teaching aspect. I really thought the tutorials they did were cool and I had started doing some at EPFL. So I traveled around Europe doing workshops, teaching people how to use a Raspberry Pi and connect these tools. Then when I joined full-time after my masters, I focused more on audio signal processing and machine learning while still doing workshops now and then.
It was a unique role being the link between the machine learning models the engineers were developing, the more classical DSP (digital signal processing) techniques, and the room acoustics. I got to interact with a lot of teams at Snips and then also at Sonos when we got acquired. The acquisition was interesting because Snips was a very innovative machine learning company and Sonos is a very classic audio device/acoustics company. So my role was interacting between multiple teams to integrate both technologies, which was nice.
What made you decide to leave Sonos and pursue a PhD, even though things seemed to be going really well there?
Even when I joined Snips, I was actually between a PhD or joining them. It was always in the discussion, like could we do a joint PhD, but it didn’t end up happening. Similar to what Vinitra said about Microsoft, after the acquisition, for the first few months there were so many cool things we were building and incorporating. But then after that, I didn’t really see more growth or learning.
Especially when you’re no longer in a startup scenario where they’re more flexible with how you use your time. Like at Snips I was doing all these workshops, but after the acquisition they obviously wanted us to focus on putting together the product, Sonos Voice. We weren’t doing the workshops anymore since it was no longer a free tool people could put on a Raspberry Pi. And now it’s super cool to see the product out there and to use it at home!
But in the end, missing that component of going to developer events, interacting with the community, and not seeing that growth anymore were kind of the reasons I decided to go back to academia to go a PhD. Luckily I still had that contact with my now-supervisor Martin Vetterli, and I came back to his lab.
The Value of working on Open-Source
You’ve done a lot of work with open source projects, like with Snips. Why do you think open source is important and what have you gained from contributing?
The first open source project I got involved in was with the lab at EPFL. It really pushes you to do better practices in coding, because when you open source your code and it’s messy, no one’s going to want to use it. The gains you can get from other people’s ideas and contributions are as big as the number of people who can program or understand what you’re coding. So the easier you can make things for others to understand, the more likely you’ll get collaborators.
In terms of research, there’s more trust in your work because people can see your code. It could also lead to citations since people can see they can use your package or software. So there’s incentive for researchers there.
If you’re applying to companies, contributing to open source is a huge bonus to put on your CV. It’s a skill you’re showing that you can contribute to code that’s not your own, you’re comfortable putting your code out there. It’s almost a service to the community - if you can save someone even just 10 minutes or a few hours, that’s incredible. And they’ll probably figure out ways to make the development experience even better for others.
We hear more and more about open source as a huge trend, in industry, startups, academia. The space I’m really interested in is how people do business out of open source, like with Hugging Face. I’m curious what the business model is and how they’re going to sustain it, but it’s definitely becoming a trend.
Organizing Hackathons at EPFL with Lauzhack
What made you want to start organizing the LauzHack hackathon at EPFL?
My co-founder Sourabh and I both did our bachelors together in Germany. He was super into hackathons and had been to so many. He came to me saying there were no yearly hackathon happening at EPFL, there used to be a couple years ago but nothing regular. He asked if I wanted to try it out and I said sure, why not. I never thought of myself as an expert programmer.
We went to a couple hackathons together and realized we could do this. What really helped was when I came to EPFL, I was a master’s research scholar with Martin Vetterli. Having him in my network helped open the door at EPFL to say “can we do this event?” He fully supported us and it gave me something I was really passionate to work on.
Sometimes in your courses you don’t feel like you’re helping anyone, you’re in your own bubble. Even when doing a PhD it can feel that way. So organizing the events with LauzHack gives me more of a sense of service to the community.
Walk me through the process of organizing a hackathon. How do you handle everything with the LauzHack team?
We have a “how to” document that we’ve “open-sourced”. We essentially made it to show how to do a hackathon at EPFL, but it could translate to other places too. Anyone who wants to do an event can use this document.
Solal, who’s one of the founding team members, is a beast when it comes to logistics and planning. He put together this document that we use at the beginning of every hackathon to go through the steps, make sure we’re on track, and assign roles.
Ideally we try to have someone in charge of sponsoring, marketing, and the different aspects you can see in the document. That person is responsible for those items. Everything is broken down in terms of when it needs to be done, like a month or two before. We meet every two weeks getting closer to the event and make sure things are assigned.
What do you hope students gain from participating in a LauzHack hackathon?
It’s not something we’ve formally tracked, but a successful outcome is always at the beginning of the hackathon when I ask “how many of you is this your first hackathon?” and usually more than half the people raise their hand. There are so many hackathons around here and EPFL students are super busy, so for me, the success is that we get people coming out of their comfort zone. A lot of them continue until the end doing their first hackathon, doing something that’s not clearly defined like a school project. That’s already the win for me, it’s the start for hopefully more things down the line.
Why should people join Lauzhack?
A few things I would say.
First, it's just a really dynamic and cool team. The network you build is also incredible. Probably the people who’ve gotten more jobs out of our events are definitely the organizers rather than the students, because when you’re in the hackathon you’re just so focused on your project that you don’t really have time to interact with the sponsors. So we have lots of people who’ve gone to Logitech and other companies as well.
Another reason which I think is a big motivator for me was this ability to serve your community. There’s this speech from Martin Luther King, which I find super inspirational. He calls it the three dimensions of life. One of them is taking care of yourself, like doing everything you can for your career, your health… The second dimension he talks about is taking care of others and serving others. And the third one he links to God, but could also be your purpose in life.
So when I think of success, it’s really grounding and a healthy way to think about. With Lauzhack, I have the amazing opportunity to stretch these multiple dimensions in my life. Especially in the ups and downs of a PhD or maybe even in your studies, it's just so cool to be surrounded by people who are just so curious and hardworking and motivating and just people that you can learn from. So the ambience and mood of it is super encouraging.
You were also involved with S2S Ventures, a student-run VC fund. What drew you to delve more into the entrepreneurial-side of things?
What drew me to S2S was wanting to see some of these hackathon projects progress further. You see some amazing ideas at hackathons because people are in the zone, collaborating efficiently. But then a lot of it just ends at the hackathon.
So what interested me was - what could be the next step? What opportunities are there for students to take this beyond just a weekend project and really think about if there’s a business there? Ideally a business that can be useful and helpful to society.
I had already met Arnout Devos (founding member of S2S) a few times at different LauzHack events. He mentioned S2S and I wanted to try it out to see what opportunities were out there. I hadn’t thought much about VC before that, so it was interesting to see it from the investor side. What criteria do they view as important, looking beyond just “is this a cool idea”?
Plans after the PhD
You’re nearing the end of your PhD. What are your plans for after you finish, both in terms of your career and with LauzHack?
I have about a year left, hopefully. The plan is to go back to Paris. I’m not sure yet if I’ll continue in academia or go to industry, but probably more in the startup area. Not necessarily starting my own, I think I’d prefer joining an earlier stage startup. So something between those two paths.
For sure I want to continue events like LauzHack. That’s why I’m trying to put more of my content on GitHub and Medium, blogging, etc. Hopefully I can do these types of events in Paris as well, at universities but also for people in industry. I was really lucky to have already worked in Paris and did an internship at a lab at ENS, so I’ve been building up a network there to hopefully get involved with exciting stuff!
Advice for readers
Do you have any advice for students? How do you think they should spend their time?
I would say, don’t just do courses. Maybe I’m biased, but go to events like LauzHack workshops and hackathons, join or start an association, because you’re going to meet really cool people that way. Whether you work in academia or industry, you’re rarely going to be doing things on your own. It’s really important to work on your soft skills, especially that hard-to-teach mix of technical soft skills like brainstorming features, integrating incompatible code, and explaining technical concepts. All of which can be practiced at hackathons!
The second thing, are those three dimensions from the MLK speech. If you go all in on one dimension, you’re going to feel maybe empty on the others. So you’ll either lose your purpose/meaning, and you may feel ‘okay, what am I doing to help others’? So having those different dimensions in your life is important.
Closing Notes
Hey! Sorry for not posting the past two weeks - it’s been super busy (and I’m visiting SF!) - but I’m working on making the posts consistent here on out!
As always, hope you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter, and vote in the poll 👇