NFI scientist appointed Professor by Special Appointment in Nijmegen
Prof. Dr David van Leeuwen has been appointed Professor by Special Appointment of ‘Forensic applications in speech and language technology’ at the Faculty of Arts of Radboud University in Nijmegen (RUN) as of 1 March 2012.
Van Leeuwen combines this professorship with his work as a forensic investigator at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI).
Van Leeuwen had already served as Professor by Special Appointment of speech technology at Radboud University from 2008 to 2011. He was employed at TNO during that period. The new chair stems from that position but has a clearer focus on the forensic application of speech research.
Chair
Techniques have been developed for speech and language technology that automatically expose both the substantive information (what is said) and the source (who says it) of voice recordings.
Using these techniques for forensic speech research is problematic since the circumstances under which the recordings offered for forensics are made cannot be monitored. For example, a lot of background noise may be heard in the recording or the recording may be made with a new technique, such as WhatsApp.
Current techniques are inadequate in these types of cases. Therefore, the use of these automatic analytical technologies is still in its infancy in forensic speech research.
Van Leeuwen’s chair is geared toward overcoming these difficulties so that generally applicable systems can be constructed for forensic speech recognition research.
Collaboration between the University and NFI
The chair fits within the objective of the NFI to collaborate with the academic world in a variety of important forensic research areas to achieve a leading forensic research programme.
Curriculum vitae
David van Leeuwen was born in 1966 and studied physics at the Technical University of Delft. He obtained his doctorate in 1993 for research on the magnetic properties of metal cluster molecules. From 1994 to 2011, he worked as an investigator at TNO Human Factors on various aspects of speech technology. He evaluated systems of automatic speech recognition in various languages. He was also one of the developers of the first speaker-independent, large vocabulary speech recognition system for the Dutch language.