Oxford Wave Research in Turkey for IAFPA 2019

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.