Curriculum Vitae
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 first-author papers in graduate school received major awards — an ACM Distinguished Paper Award and an IEEE Best Paper Runner-Up Award. My dissertation research on LLM-powered smart environments has been cited by researchers at Amazon, MIT, Samsung, and Toyota Research, and referenced in granted Amazon patents related to next-generation Alexa systems.
Most recently, I was a founding engineer at Moonshine AI alongside Pete Warden and Manjunath Kudlur, the architects of TensorFlow Lite and TinyML. I built the data infrastructure behind Moonshine’s ASR models, which outperform offerings from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Google, and Meta on the OpenASR leaderboard while running 5-15x faster and 28x smaller. The work shipped as an open-source library with more than 8,000 GitHub stars and first-class integration into Hugging Face Transformers, Microsoft tooling, and Fortune 500 products under NDA.
My work spans the full on-device AI stack: data engineering, model architecture, quantization, embedded deployment, and human-centered evaluation.
Education
| PhD, Electrical & Computer Engineering | Jan 2021 – Dec 2024 |
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| University of Texas at Austin |
| BS, Computer Science | May 2017 |
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| University of New Mexico | |
| Marketing Minor |
Research Experience
| Senior Research Engineer | Aug 2023 – present |
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| Moonshine AI | |
| Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Applied Research Intern | Summer 2023 |
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| Toyota North America R&D | |
| Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Graduate Research Assistant | Jan 2021 – Dec 2024 |
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| University of Texas at Austin (Cockrell School of Engineering) | |
| Austin, TX, USA | |
| Advisor: Dr. Christine Julien |
| Associate Computer Scientist | Oct 2018 – Jan 2021 |
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| Air Force Research Laboratory (Space Vehicles Directorate) | |
| Albuquerque, NM, USA |
| Undergraduate Independent Study | Aug 2016 – May 2017 |
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| University of New Mexico (Department of Computer Science) | |
| Albuquerque, NM, USA | |
| Advisor: Dr. Gruia-Catalin Roman |
| Data Science Intern | Summer 2016 |
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| New Mexico Environment Department | |
| Rio Rancho, NM, USA |
Teaching Experience
| Software Engineering | Supervised Lecturer | UT Austin | F2022 |
| Advanced App Dev. | Teaching Assistant | UT Austin | Su2022 |
| Software Engineering | Teaching Assistant | UT Austin | F2021, Sp2022, F2023 |
| Software Engineering | Teaching Assistant | UNM | Sp2017, Su2017 |
| Design of Large Programs | Teaching Assistant | UNM | Sp2017 |
| Data Organization in C | Teaching Assistant | UNM | F2016 |
Publications
Papers
King, E., Yu, H., Vartak, S., Jacob, J., Lee, S., & Julien, C. (2025). Teaching Things to Think: Bootstrapping Local Reasoning for Smar(er) Devices. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom). IEEE, 2025. Best Paper (Runner Up) Award.
King, E., Yu, H., Lee, S., & Julien, C. (2024). Sasha: Creative Goal-Oriented Reasoning in Smart Homes with Large Language Models. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 8(1). ACM Distinguished Paper Award.
Chen, H. Y., King, E., & Julien, C. (2023, November). Nod: Lightweight Continuous Neighbor Discovery on Everyday Devices. In International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services (pp. 3-25). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
King, E., & Julien, C. (2023, September). CANDor: Continuous Adaptive Neighbor Discovery. In 2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS) (pp. 336-342). IEEE.
Pre-prints
King, E., Sabra, A., Kudlur, M., Wang, J., & Warden, P. (2025). Flavors of Moonshine: Tiny Specialized ASR Models for Edge Devices. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.02523.
Jeffries, N., King, E., Kudlur, M., Nicholson, G., Wang, J., & Warden, P. (2024). Moonshine: Speech Recognition for Live Transcription and Voice Commands. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.15608.
King, E., Yu, H., Vartak, S., Jacob, J., Lee, S., & Julien, C. (2024). Thoughtful Things: Building Human-Centric Smart Devices with Small Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.03821.
Yu, H., An, J., King, E., Thomaz, E., & Julien, C. (2023). Cheating off your neighbors: Improving activity recognition through corroboration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.06078.
King, E., Yu, H., Lee, S., & Julien, C. (2023). “Get ready for a party”: Exploring smarter smart spaces with help from large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.09802.
Patents
Pending
King, E., Wang, C., Pham, A. (2024) “Energy-efficient vehicular distributed machine learning”. U.S. Patent Application No. 18/430,491.
Public Engagement
Edge to Impact: Building Human-Centric AI Models at Scale. Podcast appearance. Silicon Grapevine, EE Times. February 2026.
From Rulesets to Reasoning: Building More Thoughtful Devices in the Age of Generative AI. Invited talk. Virginia Tech, Department of Computer Science. March 2025.
Honors & Awards
| ACM Distinguished Paper Award | ACM IMWUT ‘25 | 2025 |
| Best Paper (Runner Up) | IEEE PerCom ‘25 | 2025 |
| Dr. Brooks Carlton Fowler Fellowship | UT Austin | 2023 |
| NSF I-Corps | 2019 |
Professional & Community Service
| Peer Reviewer | ACM | 2024, 2025 |
| Public Park Cleanup | Austin Parks Department | 2022, 2023 |
| English Tutor | Kadena Language Institute | 2018 |
| Brigade Organizer | Code for America | 2015 |
| Outreach Volunteer | Createathon | 2015 |