Voice biometrics developer SpeechPro has donated $25,000 worth of technology and training personnel to West Virginia University’s speech signal representation curriculum. The gift has been offered as part of the WVU Foundation’s fundraising campaign, “A State of Minds: The Campaign for West Virginia’s University.”
SpeechPro staff will assist in the classroom as students use their audio forensic programs SISII, SoundCleanerII, and Easy Voice Biometrics. Brian Woerner, chair of the school’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, explained in a press release the idea is to get students familiar with “real off-the-shelf biometrics products” allowing them analyze speech signals with robust software. It also presumably could offer some benefit to SpeechPro to have students familiarizing themselves with technology that they may later consider using in the field.
In any case, it’s a step forward in a growing partnership between the private sector and the academic and public sectors; America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology recently issued a call for assistance from private biometric firms to help develop tattoo-recognition technology, while Michigan State University has developed facial recognition technology that can match police sketches to photographs. These inter-linkages all underline the fact that while biometric technology has plenty of commercial applications, its security applications are of salient interest to many government actors and agencies.
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November 14, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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