ASSTA FSSC

Jennifer Elliott
Ms Elliott has a Master of Philosophy in forensic speaker identification from the Australian National University. Her 2003 M. Phil thesis examined the strength of auditory evidence using Baysian likelihood ratios to compare within- and between speaker differences in auditory phonetic features. She was awarded the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association’s New Researcher Award in 2000 for her paper Auditory and F-pattern variations in okay - a forensic-phonetic investigation, and has published a number of other papers on both linguistics and forensic phonetics. She is also a member of the International Association of Forensic Phonetics & Acoustics. She has undertaken case work in relation to a number of criminal prosecutions, and has also been retained by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to analyse and report on voice recordings of air crew as part of ATSB investigations into a number of fatal aircraft accidents. Ms Elliott, an Executive Officer in the Research School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University, also works as a private consultant in forensic speech analysis.

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Dr Helen Fraser
Dr Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New England, Armidale. She has a strong background in phonetics, with a BA (Hons) from Macquarie University and a Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh. Her major focus is on cognitive aspects of phonetics, especially speech perception, pronunciation and literacy. She has been involved in forensic case-work since 1993. In recent years she has specialised in issues to do with forensic transcription of poorly recorded materials (see her article on Issues in Transcription: Factors affecting the reliability of transcripts as evidence in legal cases in the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law), but she also has consulted in smaller speaker identification cases. Dr Fraser is well known for her leading role in dissemination of information about phonetics and speech perception to the legal and law enforcement professions through seminars and publications such as What phonetics expert witnesses can (and can't) say about speaker identification in Law Society of Tasmania Newsletter, or Identifying Taped Voices: What phonetic science can and can't do in Policing Issues and Practices Journal. Her Forensic Phonetics website gets many hits every week and has gained appreciation from a range of professions in many countries around the world. She has also been active in creating and publicising guidelines for the use of so-called language tests in the determination of asylum seekers' nationality (see her joint article on Linguistic identification in the determination of nationality: A preliminary report in Language Policy).

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Dr John Ingram
John Ingram is senior lecturer in Phonetics and Linguistics in the Linguistics Program at the University of Queensland. He hold a first class honours degree in Psychology from the University of Tasmania; a M.Ed in Educational Psychology; and a Ph.D in Phonetics and Psycholinguistics from the University of Alberta. He is a founding executive member both of the Australasian Speech Science & Technology Association, and the ASSTA Forensic Speech Science Committee. His research interests span Phonetics and Psycholinguistics, with a focus on speech variation, speech disorders, connected speech processes, and phonetic and phonological transfer effects in second language learning. He is author of Neurolinguistics: An introduction to spoken language processing and its disorders, published by Cambridge University Press. He has approximately 15 years consulting experience in forensic speaker identification and his peer-reviewed publications include papers on formant trajectories as indices of speaker identity.

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Dr Yuko Kinoshita
Dr. Kinoshita is Course Convener of the Japanese Program in the School of Languages and International Studies at the University of Canberra. She holds a doctorate in forensic speaker recognition from the Australian National University. Her 2001 Ph.D thesis Testing realistic forensic speaker identification in Japanese: A likelihood-ratio based approach using formants was the first study to successfully implement a forensically-motivated likelihood ratio-based approach to discrimination with formants. She has been a visiting fellow at the National Research Institute of Police Science in Japan, collaborating with Japanese forensic speaker identification experts. A member of the International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, she continues to research forensic speaker recognition and has published several papers on it. Her research interests also include linguistic phonetics, and she also holds an M.A in phonetics from the Australian National University in which she conducted research on dialectal variation in Chinese.

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Dr Philip Rose
Dr Rose is Reader in Phonetics and Chinese linguistics at the Australian National University, and has been British Academy Visiting Professor at the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning at the University of Edinburgh. He has a Ph.D in Chinese Phonetics from Cambridge, and an M.A in Linguistics and first-class honours in German from the University of Manchester. He is author of Forensic Speaker Identification, in the Taylor & Francis Forensic Science Series, and The Technical Comparison of Forensic Voice Samples in the legal reference series Expert Evidence. He has also published widely on forensic speaker identification. He is a member of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, and former Member of Council of the International Phonetic Association. He has done research for almost 30 years on similarities and differences between individuals in their speech, and has been undertaking forensic speaker identification case-work in Chinese and Australian English for over a decade.

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Professor Michael Wagner
Michael Wagner is Professor of Computing and Head of Software Engineering in the School of Information Sciences and Engineering at the University of Canberra, and also director of its Human-Computer Communication Laboratory and National Centre for Biometric Studies. Prof. Wagner's homepage. He has a Diplomphysiker degree from the University of Munich, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from the Australian National University. He was the Principal Research Scientist of a large multimedia computer-user-authentication research and development project at the Australian National University. He has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Duisburg, the Technical University of Munich, and at Siemens Research and Development Laboratories in Munich. Professor Wagner was the Foundation President of the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, a Senior Member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and a Member of the Board of the International Speech Communication Association. He has been a member of the program committees of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Eurospeech, and International Speaker Recognition Workshops. His major research interests are speech and speaker recognition, biometric person authentication, audiovisual face-voice recognition and evolutionary ethics.

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Dr Bernard Guillemin
Dr Guillemin is currently Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Auckland. He holds a doctorate in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from The University of Auckland. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the acoustic analysis of infant cry patterns, in order to investigate the possibility of developing a diagnostic tool for early detection of risk of cot death. Over the years this research interest has expanded into the general area of speech science, with a particular interest in forensic speech science. He has acted as an expert witness in Forensic Speech Science matters for New Zealand's High Court for over 20 years, a role which has expanded significantly in recent times. Some of his recent work, motivated by the increasing use by Police of recorded cell phone conversations as evidence in criminal trials, has focused on the impact on forensic speaker identification of the speech codecs used with the cell phone network (see his SST 06 paper Impact of the GSM AMR speech codec on pitch and formant information important to Forensic Speaker Identification. He is a member of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, the International Association of Forensic Linguists and the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers.

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Dr Bronwen Innes
Dr. Innes has a 2001 Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Auckland. Before that she completed a BA and MA (Hons) at the Victoria University of Wellington, which included study of phonetics and phonology. She works as a consultant and researcher in the field of language and the law. Her work includes providing advice in legal cases (e.g. on speaker identification, transcripts), plain language training and editing, and research on language use in the courtroom. Her research interests include high rising terminal intonation in New Zealand (with an article to be published shortly in the Journal on Research on Language and Social Interaction), the discourse marker well, powerless language style and miscommunication in the courtroom. She has recently been awarded funding by the New Zealand Law Foundation to conduct a research project on judges' summings-up for juries in New Zealand. She is a member of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

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Dr Debbie Loakes
Dr Loakes holds a doctorate in forensic speaker recognition from Melbourne University, where she is currently working as sessional lecturer in Linguistics, and Research assistant. Her 2006 Ph.D. thesis examined the speech patterns of identical and non-identical twins and the extent to which they could be discriminated using Bayesian Likelihood Ratios. She has casework experience in contested utterances. Her publications include 'Variation in Long-Term Fundamental Frequency: Measurements from Vocalic Segments in Twins' Speech' and 'Patterns of Frication in Australian English: An Analysis of /p t k/ in Connected Speech'. As well as forensic speaker identification, her research interests include the phonetics of Australian languages, and connected speech processes and intonation in Australian English. She is a member of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics & Acoustics, the International Phonetics Association, the International Association of Forensic Linguists, and the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, and was elected to the Golden Key Honour Society.

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