Oxford Wave Research Ltd. are pleased to announce our appointment as the exclusive distributor in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland for Salient Sciences (legal name Digital Audio Corporation, known to many as “DAC”).

We are excited to have our colleagues at Oxford Wave Research now officially offering Salient Sciences’ products and services in the UK and Ireland. We have previously worked closely with them on several interesting projects; going forward, we anticipate an even closer collaboration to provide unique, innovative solutions to our shared base of audio and video forensics clients worldwide.

Donald Tunstall, General Manager, Salient Sciences:

We also have many years of experience working with the DAC hardware-based audio processing solutions, such as the MicroDAC, PCAP, and CARDINAL AudioLab systems.

OWR will now be taking over all sales and support in the UK and Ireland, with immediate effect, for the VideoFOCUS and CARDINAL MiniLab Suite products, including all maintenance contracts and support.

Watch this space for training course announcements from DAC in the UK in 2020.

Dr Ekrem Malkoç is joining Oxford Wave Research as our Technical Sales Manager. He will be spearheading expansion of Oxford Wave Research’s forensic and commercial speech and audio processing products into new regions and markets.

Ekrem is a well-known expert in the field of forensic speech and audio processing, forensic image analysis as well as forensic linguistics. He has a PhD in forensic linguistics from Ankara University (Turkey), MSc and MA degrees in Criminalistics and European Criminology from the Ankara University and Katholieke University of Leuven (Belgium) respectively, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Ekrem worked in Turkish Gendarmerie till 2015 as a Colonel after having served as the manager of two regional Gendarmerie Forensic Laboratories.

You can read more about him here https://oxfordwaveresearch.com/about-us/

Last week (14-17 July 2019) some of the OWR team had the pleasure of attending the annual IAFPA (International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics) conference which was hosted this year in Istanbul, Turkey. 

It was a great opportunity for us to learn about the work of other members of the forensic phonetics and acoustics community from all around the world. One of the hot topics  IAFPA this year was cross-language speaker comparison (Croatian-Serbian, Czech-Persian and French-English to name a few) We were delighted to see how much of this and other research from Switzerland and the Netherlands made use of the capabilities of our forensic automatic speaker recognition software VOCALISE. 

We enjoyed every part of the conference but the highlight for us was undoubtedly our intern Linda’s poster winning the 2019 Best Student Poster award. As you can imagine, the team celebrated appropriately with Turkish beer. 

We also showcased our advances in the use of Deep Neural Network (DNN)s using x-vectors in automatic speaker comparison and speaker profiling, presented by Dr. Finnian Kelly, our Principal Research Scientist.

Abstracts of our papers:
 
1. From i-vectors to x-vectors – a generational change in speaker recognition illustrated on the NFI-FRIDA database, Finnian Kelly, Anil Alexander, Oscar Forth and David van der Vloed, 14-17 July 2019, International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) Conference, Istanbul, Turkey [download here]

2. The effect of background selection on the strength of evidence
David van der Vloed, Finnian Kelly and Anil Alexander, 14-17 July 2019, International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) Conference, Istanbul, Turkey [download here]

3. One out of many: A sliding window approach to automatic speaker recognition with multi-speaker files Linda Gerlach, Finnian Kelly and Anil Alexander, 14-17 July 2019, International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) Conference, Istanbul, Turkey [download here]

4. More than just identity: speaker recognition and speaker profiling using the GBR-ENG database, Linda Gerlach, Finnian Kelly and Anil Alexander 14-17 July 2019, International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) Conference, Istanbul, Turkey (Winner of 2019 Best Student Paper award) [download here]

Special thanks to Burcu Önder Gürpinar for 4 fantastic days of forensics and we look forward to showing you what we have in store for IAFPA 2020.

Linda Gerlach, who is interning with us from the Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany, is working on a collaborative project between Oxford Wave Research (OWR) and the University of Cambridge. This work forms part of her MA thesis and seeks to better understand the relation of voice similarity ratings by humans and by an automatic approach. Results from this work could potentially help develop forensically sound methods and solutions for voice lineups (where a witness has to pick out the voice of a perpetrator from a lineup of foils).

This test takes about 15 mins and you will be presented with pairs of voice recordings by male speakers and asked to judge the similarity of each pair.

Thank you!

Oscar Forth and  Sam Kent, representing Oxford Wave Research’s R&D and software development team, are pleased to be attending the TAPAS TE2 Workshop on Speech Processing and Machine Learning hosted by INESC, Lisbon, Portugal.

They will be providing a short presentation and further developing our engagement with the TAPAS project.

TAPAS: Training Network on Automatic Processing of PAthological Speech, is an EU funded project looking at, and finding solutions to, the challenges facing people living with debilitating speech pathologies in an era where speech based technologies play an ever increasing role in our day to day lives.

https://www.tapas-etn-eu.org/