FACTOR is pleased to announce our Week 3 discussion for FACTOR PhD students and staff:

TITLE

Trust in the VoiD: another unsuccessful grant application

ABSTRACT

We’ve had yet another grant application turned down. Rather than bin it straight away, we’ll read it and discuss it together. We’ll look at two aspects:

• The project idea, design and usefulness. What’s worth keeping, and how might we build on it?
• The proposal as an example of a grant application, sparking discussion about good and bad practice in grant writing. You can be honest about what you think, we can handle it.

The application will be circulated by email beforehand, so please give it a read before the session.

TIME & PLACE

W03, 1100-1150, Tue 20th Oct 2026

In-person: County South D72

Please note that this session is for FACTOR PhD students and staff only.

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

From Friday, we’re making a small change to the FACTOR site and its email updates.

What’s changing

• Talks and events: the content you know and love – our seminars, workshops, careers events, occasional conferences, summer schools, and other things you might want to attend
• Jobs and opportunities: this is the new stuff – a weekly selection of relevant jobs, paid placements and internships, funded studentships and scholarships, paid work while studying, and other worthwhile opportunities

Managing your subscription

If you’re already subscribed to FACTOR by email, WordPress has automatically subscribed you to both of these new categories. We would have preferred to leave Jobs and opportunities switched off initially so that each of you could choose to opt in, but new newsletter categories are automatically added to existing subscriptions and, quite rightly, we can’t edit your choices for you. So…

• If you’re happy to receive both you don’t need to do anything.
• If you’d prefer Talks and events only use the Manage Subscription link at the bottom of any FACTOR email to switch off Jobs and opportunities
• Want to leave altogether? You can unsubscribe from FACTOR completely from the same place

And of course, you can change your choices again at any time.

Easter egg

For reading this far, a little extra bonus: we’ve also created a FACTOR | Events Google calendar. This is populated with events that we think are likely to be useful – or at least interesting – to students, academics, and practitioners in forensic linguists, forensic speech scientists, and adjacent areas. Feel free to preview it first, and if it it looks relevant to your interests, you can subscribe by clicking “Add to Google Calendar” in the bottom left of the desktop website’s preview screen, or by using the .ics link. (This format is widely accepted by, e.g. Google, Outlook, Apple, etc.)

As always, thanks for being part of FACTOR.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our first session of the 2026-2027 academic year, an informal discussion for FACTOR PhD students and staff:

TITLE

Conference updates from the summer

ABSTRACT

Between us, we went to a number of things over the summer, so let’s pool that knowledge. It could have been an in-person conference, an online event, an internal Lancaster event or anything similar.

If you went to something, please come ready to speak for no more than 5 minutes. Share the highlights, key talks or research trends that caught your eye. It’s all informal, and there’s no need for slides.

TIME & PLACE

W01, 1100-1150, Tue 06th Oct 2026

In-person: County South D72

Please note that this session is for FACTOR PhD students and staff only.

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

Dr Justin Lo and Dr Isobelle Clarke (Linguistics and English Language) are looking for participants for a new study exploring language and voice variation.

And, unusually for something described as “taking part in research”, this one really is quite short. Continue reading →

FACTOR is pleased to announce the upcoming talk by Megan Dewar (FACTOR, LAEL):

TITLE

AI and Misogyny: Unequal, Unregulated, and Unbridled

ABSTRACT

The UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI states that: ‘AI actors should make all reasonable efforts to minimize and avoid reinforcing or perpetuating discriminatory or biased applications and outcomes throughout the life cycle of the AI system to ensure fairness of such systems’. Whilst sound in theory, there are some major issues with this statement in practice. Firstly, humans are biased, and therefore the data that AI is trained on is also biased; its outputs carry sexist undertones even when the user themselves did not set out to create content that is so. Secondly, policymakers are woefully unprepared to deal with the sheer volume and complexity of the AI content that is currently being disseminated. Finally, some AI users approach AI tools with explicit intent to create sexualised, violent, or criminal content. These issues can be considered as ‘passive’ (e.g., sexist training data, lack of moderation) or ‘active’ (e.g., content creation). The former facilitate the latter, and the latter are indicative of the attitudes of the most extreme in the current landscape of gender-based discrimination as a whole. This project is a very brief consideration of some of the recurring ideas surrounding AI and anti-gender content, where rhetorics of Andrew Tate are being parroted in the playground, LGBTQ+ people are labelled as harmful or hypersexual, and the male loneliness epidemic pushes more and more young boys towards AI girlfriends over true human connection.

TIME & PLACE

W17, 1400-1450, Thu 26th Feb 2026

In-person: County South B89

Online: Teams

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk by Scarlett Varoose-Peer (FACTOR, LAEL), in partnership with PhonLab:

TITLE

The Risk of Data Contamination in (Forensic) Voice Identification: a Perception Experiment using Voice-mixed Speech Samples

ABSTRACT

Data contamination is a widely acknowledged phenomenon across many forensic disciplines. However, in an apparent single-speaker sample obtained from a multi-speaker recording, how could we establish whether that sample has been ‘mixed’ with other voices present in that original recording? This talk introduces ‘voice-mixing’ – a form of data contamination that specifically impacts voice identification analyses. In doing so, this talk details the design and results of a perception experiment in which 121 lay listeners were exposed to 21 audio samples created using the West Yorkshire Regional English Dataset (WYRED; Gold, Ross & Earnshaw, 2018): 6 were ‘authentic’ (i.e., non-voice-mixed) and 15 were ‘voice-mixed’. The voice-mixed samples ranged from low-to-high similarity speaker pairs. Using a 5-point Likert scale, listeners reported the extent to which they believed each sample to be voice-mixed/authentic. The results revealed that there was not a significant relationship between actual exposure to a voice-mixed sample and perceiving it as voice-mixed. However, on modelling the degree of similarity within the voice-mixed samples, this revealed a significant relationship: listeners were more likely to rate high-similarity voice-mixed samples as ‘authentic’ than they were for lower similarity samples. The results also revealed that several participant-intrinsic and participant-extrinsic factors impacted the perception of voice-mixed versus authentic samples. Taken together, I argue that data contamination- and specifically voice-mixing, poses a very real risk in (forensic) voice identification. In a climate of striving for trust in intelligence operations and the criminal justice system, it is time we start to address these risks.

TIME & PLACE

W07, 1500-1550, Tue 18th Nov 2025

In-person: County South B89

Online: Teams

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce a talk by Alice Paver (Cambridge), in partnership with PhonLab:

TITLE

Perceived voice similarity, voice quality and the telephone effect: an experiment

ABSTRACT

Voice quality (VQ) is considered a key speaker-specific feature for speaker comparison conducted by forensic phoneticians, but as audio samples for analysis are often of poor and/or mismatched quality (e.g. telephone vs. police interview), analysts must consider the potential effect of audio quality on perception of VQ which can affect expert assessments. Perceived voice similarity (PVS) is also a concern for experts, not just for speaker comparison but also when collecting earwitness evidence via voice parades. VQ is a phonetic correlate of PVS judgements by lay-listeners, and telephone transmission is known to reduce perceptual distance between voices, but the perceptual effect of reduced audio quality on specific VQ settings across multiple speakers is not yet known. An online experiment investigated the relationship between VQ and PVS in different audio quality conditions. This talk will discuss findings and their implications for our understanding of perceived voice similarity and the role voice quality plays in forensically relevant audio quality conditions.

TIME & PLACE

W04, 1500-1550, Tue 28th Oct 2025

In-person: County South B89

Online: Teams

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our Week 3 discussion, which will be led by Dr Justin Lo:

TITLE

Public trust in digital data & evidence

ABSTRACT

For Week 3, we are planning to have a discussion on public trust in digital data and evidence. This is inspired by a few reports that I have recently come across, all broadly linked to this theme and with interesting commonalities, and I thought it would be worth having a think what the issues outlined in these reports mean for the forensic and security areas. I’ll present a brief summary in the beginning, but I also invite you to have a quick read (none of them are particularly lengthy):

1. CETaS report on UK public attitudes to national security data processing: Assessing human and machine intrusion (linked) (The report is long, but there is a good executive summary.)
2. Williams et al. (2026). Public perceptions of speech technology trust in the United Kingdom. Computer Speech & Language
3. Trust in Forensic Science Evidence (2024) Project Launch Event Report

TIME & PLACE

W03, 1400-1450, Thu 23rd Oct 2025

In-person: County South C89

Online: Teams

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce a special extra FACTOR event. This very last meeting of the 2024-2025 academic year is the rescheduled talk by Dr Christin Kirchhübel (Principal Consultant, Soundscape Voice Evidence):

TITLE

What’s the (copy)right way? Navigating legal issues around the input and output of large speech and language models

ABSTRACT

Large speech and language models present new challenges for existing copyright law: To what extent does developing these models pose copyright infringement risks? What is the copyright status of the outputs of these models? This talk addresses these two questions, highlighting some of the current conversations and legal cases in this sphere.

TIME & PLACE

W22, 1300-1350, Mon 28th Apr 2025

In-person: Cavendish Colloquium

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.