Professor Martin Russell BSc, PhD, FIMA, CMath, MIEEE

• PhD Mathematics, 1981
• BSc Mathematics, 1977

Martin Russell graduated from Hull University with a BSc (1977) and PhD (1981), both in mathematics. In 1980 he joined the newly formed Automatic Speech Recognition research group at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE Malvern). Later this became the DERA Speech Research Unit (SRU), the main government funded speech technology laboratory in the UK. He joined the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham in 1998 and moved to the School of Computer Science in 2018. Martin’s research is in the area of speech and language science and technology. He is particularly interested in the developments of new formalisms for speech pattern modelling, speech technologies for education and children, and the role of regional accents in speech and language technology. Martin’s research has been funded by EPSRC, the EU, UK Government and Industry, and the US Government.

Teaching 2019/20

• Mathematical Modelling and Decision Making (UG Year 2)

• Intelligent Data Analysis (UG Year 3 and MSc)

Current PhD students are:

• Xizi Wei: Automatic assessment of Motivational Interviews using Speech and Language technology
• Mengjie Qian: Computer Assisted Language Learning for Children
• Yikai Peng: Compensating for Object Variability in Object-Centered Human Activity Recognition
• Guy Coop: Automatic Sentiment Analysis in Motivational Interview Conversations
• Chloe Seivwright: Speech Recognition using Continuous State Hidden Markov Models

RESEARCH THEMES
I am interested in all aspects of speech and language science and technology, and in particular automatic speech recognition. For many years I have worked on the development of novel mathematical acoustic speech models for speech recognition. I believe that an important challenge is to build computationally useful models of speech and language that capture its structure and regularities, to understand the underlying mechanisms that give rise to variability, and to understand the representations of speech and language that emerge in modern approaches based on deep neural networks and machine learning. I have an ongoing interest in speech and language technologies for children's speech, in the application of these technologies in education, and in the challenges of accommodating regional dialects and accents. I have also worked on the application of techniques originating in speech technology to other problems, for example human activity recognition.

• Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA)

• Member of the IEEE

• Member of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association)

• Co-founder and Chair (2012-2015) of the ISCA Special Interest Group SLaTE (Speech and Language Technologies in Education)

• Member of the Scientific Committee for WOCCI (Workshop on Child Computer Interaction)

• Member of the editorial boards of Computer Speech and Language and Natural Language Engineering