Charles C. Onu
Computer scientist
About
I'm the founder and CEO of Ubenwa, a company dedicated to improving access to healthcare with voice AI. Through research partnerships with children's hospitals across 3 continents, we developed Nanni AI, the first AI that interpretes infants' needs and health using only the sound of their cry. Nanni AI has served half a million users across every country in the world.
We also built Roseline AI, an autonomous voice agent that helps patients get care faster. Roseline handles tens of thousands of calls monthly for Canadian healthcare organisations. We are backed by VCs Radical Ventures and AIX Ventures. Other investors include AI leaders: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Hugo Larochelle, and Marc Bellemare.
I completed my PhD in AI at Mila and McGill University, focusing on neural transfer learning, domain adaptation, and model compression. I had the privilege of working with some of the field's leading minds: Doina Precup, Yoshua Bengio, and Joelle Pineau.
Outside of work, I recharge through sports and music. I play tennis, swim and love hiking. I play the keyboard and guitar, and performed at the closing banquets of NeurIPS in 2018 and 2019.
Selected publications
Making deep neural networks work for medical audio: representation, compression and domain adaptation
Charles C. Onu. Arxiv Preprint, 2024.
A cry for help: Early detection of brain injury in newborns
Charles C. Onu, Samantha Latremouille, Arsenii Gorin, et al. Arxiv Preprint, 2023.
A Fully Tensorized Recurrent Neural Network
Charles C. Onu, Jacob E. Miller, Doina Precup. Arxiv Preprint, 2020.
Neural Transfer Learning for Cry-based Diagnosis of Perinatal Asphyxia
Charles C. Onu, Jonathan Lebensold, William L. Hamilton, Doina Precup. The 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2019.
Selected talks
TEDx Talk — Translating cries: the role of AI in understanding babies.
Elevate Festival — Panel on AI in healthcare.
DeepLearning.AI — Project spotlight in the AI for Good Specialization.
AIX Ventures — Talk for the firm's founder community.
Podcasts — TWIML AI (2018), The AI Element (2019), Robin.ly (2020).
Honours & awards
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship — Canada's most prestigious doctoral award, 2019.
Harvard CRCS Rising Star Award — for work on AI for social good, 2021.
Best Paper Award — NeurIPS 2015 Workshop on Machine Learning for Healthcare.