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The Human Factors Group (HFG) has established an evidence base to inform the design, implementation and evaluation of risk communications in promoting safe behaviour. They have delineated a range of design, linguistic and personal variables that influence the effectiveness of risk communications, as well as identifying important demographic and psychological variables that affect personal safety, particularly in relation to driving. This evidence has been used to inform the development of road safety interventions and tools/guidelines for communication in civil emergencies. There has been impact at national and local government level, driving changes in policy and practice. Evidence has been integrated into the road safety policy and interventions of local government, and into government guidance on communicating during civil emergencies. Emergency preparedness documents for public use have been developed and validated. Our success at embedding research evidence into practice has received national and international recognition (e.g. Prince Michael International Road Safety Award, 2012; HM Government Emergency Preparedness Guidance - case study illustrating good practice; and a request for dissemination to World Health Organisation).
Nearly every large-vocabulary speech recognition system in current use employs outputs from fundamental research carried out in the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering (DoEng) on adaptation of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). One example of the commercial application of these outputs is their use on the Microsoft Windows desktop for both the command and control functions and the dictation functions. Approximately one billion copies of Windows have been shipped since 2008. Other examples show the outputs used in the automatic transcription of a wide range of types of data. [text removed for publication]
Forensic speaker comparison is the analysis of recorded speech with evidential value in legal (usually criminal) cases. It is now routinely undertaken in the UK (ca. 600 cases annually) and increasingly elsewhere. It is vital that casework is underpinned by robust research, that reliable methods are applied, and that evidential results are framed appropriately. York is one of the world's largest research groups in forensic speech science, and in those academic disciplines (phonetics, sociolinguistics, sociophonetics) that provide the essential foundation for this applied field. The impacts of York research are felt through (i) enhancing understanding of variation in speech; (ii) applying research findings via collaboration in casework and research with J P French Associates (JPFA), one of the world's leading laboratories; (iii) providing doctoral research supervision for JPFA staff and professional training for other experts; (iv) providing expert evidence in legal cases in the UK and internationally; and (v) improving policy on expert evidence in the UK.
Stroke and other forms of brain injury often result in debilitating communication impairments. For example, patients with acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) experience difficulties that affect their capacity to verbally express thoughts and needs. Such individuals have benefitted from the development of a novel computerised treatment — "Sheffield Word" (SWORD). Patients who took part in clinical trials showed improvements in aspects of speech that were impaired after stroke. SWORD is now used by healthcare teams worldwide, providing benefits to a large patient population. The SWORD computerised treatment is convenient to use at home, fosters users' autonomy, and delivers higher treatment doses than possible through traditional clinical sessions. Clinicians who treat AOS have also benefitted through education, training and access to online materials about SWORD which were provided by the research team.
Increasingly in court cases the recorded voice of a perpetrator has to be compared with that of a suspect. Research on speaker characteristics carried out by/under Prof. Nolan has directly contributed to the work of those offering forensic speech services commercially or developing relevant speech processing software. Impact arises from seminal ideas such as LTF (Long Term Formant) analysis, and from the 100-speaker `DyViS' accent-matched database. The latter has directly enabled: the testing of an automatic speaker recognition system preparatory to its incorporation into forensic casework; the development of speaker recognition and speaker separation software; the adoption of systematic `voice quality' analysis; and the availability for casework of population statistics on pitch and disfluencies. Public engagement has raised awareness of the possibilities and limitations of speaker identification in legal and general audiences.
Our research on speech synthesis is embodied in software tools which we make freely available. This has led to widespread use and commercial success, including direct spinouts, follow-on companies and use by major corporations. This same research benefits people who lose the ability to speak and have to rely on computer-based communication aids. Unlike existing aids, which provide a small range of inappropriate voices which are often not accepted by users, our technology can uniquely create intelligible and normal-sounding personalised voices from recordings even of disordered speech, and so enable people to communicate and retain personal identity and dignity.