In the late 2000s—around the time the iPhone came out but well before our devices were taking dictation and voice commands—three researchers were hard at work teaching machines to recognize and make sense of human speech. Adam Janin had already been working on speech recognition at ICSI for over a decade when two young computer scientists with similar interests, Arlo Faria and Korbinian Riedhammer, began spending time at the institute, first as students and visiting scholars and then as postdocs and researchers.
Together, the three hit on an idea to leverage their searchable speech recognition technologies to automate a task many people do every day: taking notes during a meeting.
After collaborating to refine their system, the team spun off a startup, ReMeeting, which won Grand Prize (and $25,000) in the UC Berkeley Startup Competition and received an award from the International Create Challenge in quick succession. The company spent some time at a local Berkeley startup accelerator before moving back to ICSI offices in 2015, where the ReMeeting team shared space with the ICSI community and built synergies with the institute’s projects.
The startup gained steam. It soon grew to about a dozen people, moved out of ICSI’s offices, and raised significant funding from investors—including $2 million from Google—based on its unique capabilities in efficient voice recognition and automatic transcribing. Within a few years, however, the business landscape changed dramatically as video conferencing took off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than continue to pursue an independent future for the audio-focused company, Janin and Faria joined Zoom, where they are now extending the ideas and technology behind ReMeeting for the video conferencing space.
What made ICSI a good place to pursue these projects?
“I was at ICSI in three different stages, first as a freshly graduated master’s student, then as a PhD student, and then as a postdoc. I kept coming back because the atmosphere was so great. It was full of these diverse people, both in terms of where they came from and in terms of their seniority. It was a great place to try things and to learn. It was a very good match for me—I felt at home.”
Korbinian Riedhammer
Former Postdoctoral Research Scientist; now Founder of ReMeeting
What made ICSI a good place to pursue these projects?
“For me, it was the culture of the place. Campus departments can’t really match ICSI in terms of the work environment, the collaboration between different people and different groups, and the social environment. It also has some industry ties. In a lot of research groups, the only product is papers. At ICSI, we absolutely wrote papers, but we also wrote code, so there was a practical side of it.
The other thing that I really liked was the diversity of people. The fact that we get people from all different experience levels led to a very lively environment, with lots of fresh ideas coming in with every batch of new visitors.”
Arlo Faria: “It’s a very different environment from [a university] campus. As a graduate student, if I had stayed on campus, I’d be exposed to much less diversity in terms of the researchers. I’d mostly be around other graduate students, maybe undergrads and postdocs, and definitely not as many foreign visitors and staff researchers.”
Adam Janin
Former Senior Research Scientist
This story was published in January 2026 as part of a retrospective series highlighting ICSI’s accomplishments and impacts over the years. To learn about our ongoing work, explore our Core Research Themes.