I am a speech scientist and technologist. My goal as a researcher is to build machine intelligence in making sense of audio, speech, and language information. This leads me to a number of subfields of computer science and electrical engineering, including infocomm, information science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and multimedia processing. As a speech technologist, I believe in social value creation using human language technology to deliver high-value-added solutions to people and society.  As an educator, I am passionate about imparting the latest knowledge in my field of study and industry experience to students. 

My research interests are in speech analytics and language intelligence, ranging from speaker recognition, language and accent recognition, speech recognition, diarization, sound classification, voice biometrics, and security, spoofing, and countermeasure. My research centers around the theme of using AI and technology to improve productivity and our daily life (a.k.a. use-inspired basic research), while acknowledging the importance of making AI accessible and explainable is the way moving forward. 

Short Bio

I began my career as a research scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore, focusing on speaker and language recognition research. During my tenure there, I advanced to the roles of a team leader and later as a strategic planning manager. From 2018 to 2020, I worked at NEC Corporation in Japan, specializing in voice biometrics and multi-modal biometrics research. I had the privilege of working with an exceptional team on the voice biometrics feature of the NEC Bio-Idiom platform [NEC Technical Journal Vol. 13 No. 2]. In July 2020, I returned to Singapore to lead the Para-linguistic AI Group at the Institute for Infocomm Research, serving as Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator. I also briefly held the position of Associate Professor at the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) from March to September/October 2023. Currently, I am an Associate Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong. I also serve as an Editor for Elsevier Computer Speech and Language (since 2016), and was an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2017 - 2021), and am an elected member of IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2019 - 2021, 2022 - 2024).

Extramural Activities

• Technical Program Co-Chair (2024) IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) Workshop, 2024, Macao. 

• Senior AE (2024 - present) IEEE Signal Processing Letters

• Technical Program Chair (2022) International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), 2022, Singapore. 

• Virtual Conference Chair (2022) IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2022, Singapore

• Area Chair (2021) IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2021, Toronto 

• TPC Co-Chair (2021) IEEE Spoken and Language Technology (SLT) Workshop 2021, China

• General Chair (2020) Speaker Odyssey 2020: Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop, Tokyo, Japan

• Elected member (2019 – 2021,  2022 – 2024) IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee 

• Associate Editor (2017 – 2021) IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing

• Editor (2016 – present) Elsevier Computer Speech and Language

Award and Honors

• 2023 Top 3% Paper Recognition, IEEE ICASSP 2023, Rhodes Island, Greece

• 2021 CRF (Used-Inspired Basic Research) Award, A*STAR, Singapore

• 2020 Outstanding Service Award, IEEE ICME 2020, London, UK 

• 2019 Outstanding Achievement Award, NEC Corporation, Japan

• 2015 Ganesh N. Ramaswamy Memorial Award, IEEE ICASSP 2015, Brisbane, Australia

• 2014 Ganesh N. Ramaswamy Memorial Award, IEEE ICASSP 2014, Florence, Italy

• 2013 Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award, Institution of Engineers, Singapore

Invited Talks and Lectures

• Invited Talk, Uncertainty in Speaker Recognition: What it Represents and How to Handle it, Frontier Forum on Intelligence Speech Analysis and Generation, Hefei, China, June 2024.

• Plenary Talk, Voice, Privacy and Adversary, Joint Workshop of VoicePersonae and ASVspoof, Tokyo, Japan, Nov 2023.

• Invited Talk, Find Your Major: Voice/Speech Processing, IEEE Tokyo Section Young Professionals & Educational Activities, Aug 2022 

• Expert Panel, Beyond Words: Recognition, Spoofing, and Anonymization of Individual Traits in Speech, ICASSP 2022, Singapore, May 2022

• Plenary Talk, Recent Trends and Challenges in Speaker Recognition, International Conference on Asian Language Processing, Singapore, Dec, 2021

• Invited Talk, Speech AI - My Voice Tells You Who I am and More, Wutong Forum, CUHK (Shenzhen), China, August 14, 2021

• Keynote talk, Embedding in Speaker Recognition and Recent Advances, Spoken Language Interaction for Mobile Transportation System Workshop, Kunshan, China, Oct 2020

• Tutorial lecture, Speaker Recognition: Fundamentals to Practice, Speech Science and Technology Conference, Sydney, Australia, Dec 2018

• Invited lecture, Factor Analysis for Speaker Recognition, Summer School on Machine Learning, University of Eastern Finland, Finland, Aug 2017