CV

• PhD in Linguistics (Free University Amsterdam) 12/2010
• MA in Linguistics cum laude (Free University Amsterdam) 2006
• Graduate studies in Linguistics (NYU) 2004
• BA in Philosophy and Mandarin Chinese (University of Massachusetts) 2001

Academic Trainings

• Senior Teaching Qualification / STQ (2023-2024)
• PhD supervision techniques (2022)
• University Teaching Qualification / BKO (2020)

University of Groningen / Campus Fryslân – Ljouwert, NL

• Associate Professor, Language and Technology (7/2020 - present)
• Manager of the Language, Technology & Culture Department
• Director of the MSc Voice Tech program
• Director of the Graduate School
• Open Science Ambassador
• Chair, Admissions Board
• Assistant Professor (09/2016 - 06/2020)

Innovation Center for Sensors & Sensor Systems – Assen, NL

• Department Head, Cognitive Systems (01/2012 -- 12/2016)
• Managed team of PhDs, postdoctoral researchers and senior scientists to develop acoustic sensors on projects relating to cochlear implants and acoustic event detection.
• Transformed research projects to market products, acquired financing for research, co-authored patents.

Free University Amsterdam – Amsterdam, NL

• Postdoctoral Researcher (01/2011 - 05/2011)
• Designed and implemented a language database to model phonetic and phonological phenomena relating to nasal harmony in highly-endangered languages.
• PhD Researcher (01/2006 - 12/2010)
• Conducted independent fieldwork in the Andean highlands under extremely adverse conditions to document an endangered language variant. Results are published in Coler (2014).

Current

• H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017 - COLING (1.58M€) Of this total funding: 189k€ is for my team. -- Additional funding provided to send team members to the Smithsonian Institute, University of North Carolina, or Calabria for up to 6 months each. Student/staff exchange at international partner institutes. We also hosted several visiting scholars worldwide. I serve as a member of the Steering Committee and as a Work Package Leader.
• VIS Virtual Exchange (15k€) 2022 Funding for a virtual exchange with Elon University, North Carolina, USA: Dutch and American students learn about cultural artifacts through 3D scanning/rendering and collaborative learning in VR environments.
• EDU+ Virtual Reality in the classroom Funding to explore integrating Virtual Reality headsets into the classroom in cooperation with the CIT group at the University of Groningen. I wrote the grant and managed the research with students.
• COST Action CA19102 - LITHME Collaborated on White Paper, student exchange, guest lectures, and similar activities. Hosted a large LITHME Conference in Leeuwarden in May 2023.

Completed

• VIS Virtual Exchange (15k€) 2021 This VIS-project was part of the course Language and Culture 2: Local Cultures and Global Commodities in the Language, Technology and Culture program of the UG, faculty Campus Fryslân. The project worked together with the Faculty of Arts of the University of Warsaw. The goal was to get students to work closely together on the diverse themes for the course, such as themes relating to cultural heritage, anthropology, and social sciences. Project outcomes.
  Partners: University of Warsaw Faculty of Artes Liberales
  Team Members: Matt Coler, Angelos Konstantinidis, Spyretta Leivaditi, Justyna Olko
• H2020 FET Open (3.6M€) - Phoenix: Exploring the Unknown through Reincarnation and Co-evolution (3.6M€) 2019. Of this total amount, 237k€ was for my team. Project involves developing successive generations of evolving hardware to explore inaccessible environments. I was Work Package Leader and Management Team Member.
• Polish Science Foundation TEAM - Language as a cure: linguistic vitality as a tool for psychological well-being, health and economic sustainability. (814k€) 2019
• Interreg VA - ID3AS (9.75M€) - Acoustic event detection. (9.75M€). 2018. Of this total, 200k€ was for my team.

• Organizer + Speaker, 2nd Dutch Speech Tech Day. (02/2024)
• Project lead, Pilot project on VR education EDU+, financed by the CvB and conducted by CF, UCG and CIT as a collaborative interfaculty programme.
• Program Committee member, Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI) Workshop at EACL 2024 (March 17–22, 2024, Malta)
• Panelist, 5th KCI Virtual Cafe (09/2023) dedicated to the theme “Languages, skills and technologies for economic growth” opened by Mr Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for Budget and Administration and Ms Genoveva Ruiz Calavera, Director General for Interpretation and Conference Organisation of the European Commission.
• Organizer, 3rd International LITHME conference (5/2023)
• Organizer, Speech Tech Summer School. More info here(5/2023)
• Popular blog post on 3D-scanning in education for a virtual exchange. (03/2023)
• Organizer + Speaker, Dutch Speech Tech Day. (02/2023)
• Speaker, Tech Update: Speech Technology. De Media Federatie. (02/2023)
• Keynote Speaker, Celebrating openness: Open Research Award 2022. Open by Design: Campus Fryslân's new MSc Voice Technology [video][slides]. (11/2022)
• Scientific Committee, 2nd Conference on Frisian Humanities (2022)
• Mozilla Contribute-a-thon: Frisian vs Dutch speech contributions — see also (2021)
• Award Committee Member, GUF-100 prize for Campus Fryslân alumnus. (2020)

• Lecturer at Campus Fryslân - Thesis Design (graduate course) (2023)
• Lecturer at Campus Fryslân - Introduction to Voice Technology (graduate course) (2021, 2022)
• Lecturer at University College Fryslân - Local Cultures (CULT200) (2020, 2021, 2022)
• Lecturer at University College Fryslân - Language & Culture I (CULT100) (2019)
• Lecturer at University College Fryslân - Academic Communication (2018)
• Lecturer at the Technical University Eindhoven - Knowledge representations (2015)
• Lecturer at the Free University Amsterdam - Anthropological Linguistics (2012)
• Lecturer at the HvA Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (2011-2012)

• Founder Advisor, Voiseed (2023–present)
• Management Committee, LITHME COST Action (2023–present)
• Board Member, Open Speech Technology Foundation (Open Spraaktechnologie)
• Open Access Ambassador for Campus Fryslân (2019–present)
• Council Member, Center for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity, University of Warsaw Steering Committee &
• Scientific Coordinator, CoLing (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017)
• Program Committee for SIGUL 2022, 2023, 2024 (i.e. a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association and of the International Speech Communication Association)
• Selection committee membership
• 2023
• University of Groningen (Faculty Campus Fryslân): Asst. Prof. (06/2023)
• 2022
• University of Groningen (Faculty Campus Fryslân): Assoc. Prof. (10/2022)
• University of Groningen (Faculty of Arts): PhD Student (09/2022)
• University of Groningen (Faculty Campus Fryslân): Asst. Prof. (02/2022) [chair]
• 2021
• University of Groningen (Faculty Campus Fryslân): PhD Student (12/2021)
• University of Groningen (Faculty Campus Fryslân): Asst. Prof. (07/2021)
• University of Groningen (Faculty Campus Fryslân): PhD Student (06/2021)
• University Warsaw (The Excellence Initiative – Research University): Postdoctoral Researcher (03/2021)
• University of Groningen (Faculty of Arts): Lecturer in Minority Studies (03/2021)
• PhD opposition membership
• 2024 (x1)
• 2023 (x1)
• 2022 (x2)
• 2021 (x2)
• 2020 (x1)
• 2018 (x1)
• 2017 (x2)
• 2016 (x2)
• 2015 (x1)
• 2011 (x2)

Current PhD students

• R. Amooie - Uni of Groningen. Defense: 2027
• Z. Li - Uni of Groningen. Defense: 2027
• F. Hopwood - Uni of Groningen. Defense: 2026
• X. Gao - Uni of Groningen. Defense: 2025
• P. Do - Uni of Groningen. Defense: 2024
• C. Sandoval - University of Lisbon. Defense: 2024

Previous PhD students

• Y. Wang - Uni of Groningen. Defended in 2023
• B. Dijkstra - Uni of Groningen. Defended in 2023
• M. Everhardt - Uni of Groningen. Defended in 2023
• V. Boswijk - Uni of Groningen. Defended in 2022
• G. Pinto de Faria Junior – VU Amsterdam. Defended in 2022
• J. Amelsvoort - Uni of Groningen. Defended in 2021
• V. Verkhodanova - Uni of Groningen. Defended in 2021
• A. Yaman - Technical Uni Eindhoven. Defended in 2019
• E. Bild - Uni of Amsterdam. Defended in 2019

Supervisor

• Balan, Dragos (2023) Improving the State-of-the-Art Frisian ASR by fine-tuning Large-Scale Cross-Lingual Pre-Trained Models. Cum laude.
• Ivanova, Vicky (2023) Synthesising Proto-Indo-European using Phonological Features for Zero-Shot Synthesis.
• Mei, Zhenkun (2023) Chinese Multi-Model Sarcasm Detection Based on Contrastive Attention Residual Late Fusion.
• Shekoufandeh, Golshid (2023) Evaluation of wav2vec 2.0 Speech Recognition for the Elderly Frisian Population. Cum laude.
• Shen, Gaofei (2022) Does Where Words Come From Matter? Leveraging Self-supervised Models for Multilingual ASR and LID.
• van Heerwaarden (2023) Hubert wins the lottery: PARP(-P) pruning the HuBERT model for downstream tasks. Cum laude.
• Weggeman, Sjors (2023) The relevance of using authentic laughter data in natural laughter synthesis: A case study on LaughNet. Cum laude.
• Zwart, Tessa (2023) Sarcastic speech synthesis in Dutch using voice-transformation.

Co-supervisor

• Baumann, Judith (2022) Improving the naturalness of an end-to-end text-to-speech system with information structure.
• Dimitrova, Iva (2023) Speaker profiling of phonated and whispered speech.
• Feenstra, Lian (2023) The performance of Whisper on Dutch dysarthric speech.
• Galjaard, Ellemijn (2023) A self-supervised approach to speech enhancement in noisy climbing gym environments.
• Leijenhorst, Elja (2023) Fine-tuning ASR to specific noise environments: noise robustness in a climbing gym.
• Nguyen, Leminh (2022) Improving Luxembourgish speech recognition with cross-lingual speech representations. Cum laude.
• Matsushima, Tatsunari (2022) Dutch Dysarthric Speech Recognition: Applying Self-Supervised Learning to Overcome the Data Scarcity Issue. Cum laude.
• Luks, BH (2022) End-to-End ASR with Binarized Neural Networks. Cum laude.
• Faste, Sarah (2022) Wav2Vec2.0 for Irish ASR: A multilingual approach to under-resourced languages.
• Wang, Yiqiu (2023) The evaluation of the feminine level of speech.

• Computer Speech & Language (2/2024)
• LITHME COST Action applications for Training School 2023 (1/2024)
• ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUAL 2023) part of INTERSPEECH (6/2023)
• Applied Acoustics (5/2023)