Matthew Karas
Founder, BabelBit • Chief Innovation Officer, Score (Subnet 44)
Matthew’s work has followed three parallel strands for 25 years: building global‑reach digital products, advancing speech & audio research, and getting ideas from the lab into durable, market‑ready systems.
Selected milestones
- Studied at Cambridge with Karen Spärck Jones, Tony Robinson and others (1994–95): Robinson's early work on using neural‑networks for large‑vocabulary ASR was a particular influence. Coincidentally, the viva for Karas's thesis was conducted by Gerald Gazdar who taught Babelbit Chief Scientist, Josh Greifer, at Sussex some years earlier.
- BBC News Online (1997–1999): designed the content production system which was finally decommissioned in May 2025.
- ITV Player (2006–07): UK’s first true “click‑to‑play” web streaming, with integrated advertising; launched six months before iPlayer.
- FutureLearn (2013-14): launch CTO of The Open University spin‑off MOOC platform.
- Founder of Dremedia (acq. by Autonomy 2003). Patents: US 11734408, US 10060579.
- Eloqute: pronunciation assessment/remediation for continuous speech. Patent: US 11810471
- GAN‑based separation applications (2019–21) tackling the cocktail‑party problem.
Key Relationships
As well as having worked closely with key innovators in media, from Bob Eggington and Tony Hall at BBC News, and documentary gurus Roger Graef and Jess Search, when developing Dremedia, Karas had 28 years of exchanging ideas and product collaborations with Autonomy founder, Mike Lynch. This spanned deployments of stochastic content structuring for news cross‑referencing, multilingual AV search, unified messaging and later projects via Invoke/Neurence — underscoring the scope and longevity of Matthew’s work bridging information retrieval, multimedia indexing, and speech technology.
Now: BabelBit
Designing a Bittensor subnet for low‑latency speech‑to‑speech translation with dual streams — a conversational real‑time path and an accuracy‑optimised record — where miners compete to reduce latency, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency.