Home

I am a Full Professor of Inclusive Speech Communication at the Delft Inclusive Speech Communication (DISC) group at the Multimedia Computing Group at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. My research aims to build inclusive speech technology, i.e. making speech technology available for everyone irrespective of how they speak or what language they speak. In my research I consider technical aspects as well as ethical and societal aspects. I am interested in anything and everything speech, ranging from human to automatic speech processing. Topics that I particularly am interested in: human and automatic speech processing, child speech, non-nativeness, low-resource languages, atypical speech, emotion, and preferably combinations of these. I use different research techniques including human listening experiments, EEG, and deep neural networks.  

From 2017-2025, I was on the Board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the largest international society on speech science and technology, where I was the chair of the Diversity committee (2019-2023) and co-chair of the Interspeech Conferences committee and of the Technical Committee (2017-2019). I served as Vice-president from 2021-2023 and as President from 2023-2025. In 2025, I was the General Chair of Interspeech 2025, the flagship conference of ISCA and the largest international conference on speech science and technology. From 2018-2022, I was a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (subarea Speech Production and Perception). From 2019-2023, I served as an (Senior) Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters. Since 2020, I am a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Unit Delft.