The University of Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership [DTP], in collaboration with Oxford Wave Research, is offering a PhD studentship for admission in October 2022 in the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Section, University of Cambridge.

The three-year doctoral programme will be co-supervised by Dr Kirsty McDougall (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) and Dr Anil Alexander (Oxford Wave Research). The project will additionally include a six-month internship at Oxford Wave Research.  

In recent years there have been significant advances in using deep neural networks to create realistic-sounding speech, and in particular to synthesize a voice or to transform one voice into another. Opportunities for crimes through the faking of a voice thus arise for both human listeners (e.g. socially-engineered fraud) and systems using voice biometrics (e.g. banking applications, or intelligent assistants like Alexa or Siri).

The proposed project will take a four-way approach to investigating fake speech, considering the production of fake speech by both humans and machines and the ability of each (humans and machines) to detect it.

Please apply online using the Applicant Portal by 14 January 2022.

For more information, visit the Job Opportunities website.