The End of BBfor2 Project

Today, 31st December 2013 is the end date of BBfor2 project. After 4 years long, this project has finally come to an end. For me personally, this is the end of my contract with the project as well. It was such a great experience for me to be included in this network. I found new friends and colleagues. Many memories and experiences have been shared. Hopefully, we can meet again in the future.

The project has ended, but the network has just begun.

Second Secondment at Agnitio, Spain.

For 2 weeks time, I've spent my time at Agnitio in Madrid for my second secondment. Agnitio is a worldwide market leader for Voice ID products (see: link). During this time, I've done lots of experiments with one of their products, Batvox, a voice biometrics tool designed for doing speaker verification for forensic purposes. The two weeks was not a long time, but I definitely learned a lot of new things.

Madrid light near Christmas 2013. 

Biometric Technologies in Forensic Science Conference 2013

On 14 and 15 October 2013, the Biometric Technologies in Forensic Science (BTFS) conference was held in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. This conference is the very last event held by BBfor2 project, the project I am in for almost 3 years. It is so sad that this project will end.

Coffee break time during BTFS 2013. 

In this BTFS conference, I presented my paper entitled "Calibration Based on Duration Quality Measures Function in Noise Robust Speaker Recognition for NIST SRE'12". In this paper, I worked with the most recent data from the speaker recognition evaluation from NIST. I was having my presentation as the first speaker on the very first session of the conference. I was so nervous, but luckily everything went good. My supervisors said that I can answer the questions in the right direction. Great!

I will definitely miss all friends and colleagues whom I met through this beautiful BBfor2 Network. I wish a successful life for each and one of them, always. See you guys in the future!

Research update - First journal article

Screen shot from my first journal article. 

It seems like there has not been a lot of updates on my research in the past year. I've never been in any conferences since summer 2012. I only attended meetings and workshops related to BBfor2 activities. However, this does not mean that I do nothing this year. 

As the tickets to my PhD defense, I have to make a thesis book. To do this, I have to at least submitted/published 3 papers to peer reviewed journals. I have been busy with this for more than a years. That is why all my publications are now focused only on journal related publications instead of conferences. 

It is a bit of a pity that I cannot attend any conferences this year. I always love in meeting people and sharing experiences at a conference. However, the priority in my career life now is to finish my PhD study because of the contract that is going to end at the end of this year, at 31 December 2013 to be exact. Yes, 3 years of my contract at the Radboud University Nijmegen almost comes to an end. 

Through this update, I want to share a happy moment in my research career. Now, I have one paper accepted and soon to be appear in the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP). It has been indexed by the journal and can be accessed through this link. I am very happy that my patient and sweat are paid after working on this particular paper for almost 9 months. 

There is no time for relaxing. The second journal article has just been submitted. The third journal article is still in the experiment stage. I have to keep running and finishing things that is need to be finished for me to get my degree. I have to do it while also planning for what may come after this PhD research ended. There is a long way ahead of me, but let's stay positive!

Last BBfor2 workshop and project meeting

In this summer, we had our last project meeting for the BBfor2 project. Besides the meeting, we also had workshop on "Practical applications of forensic biometrics" and "Entrepreneurial skills". The workshop on forensic biometrics applications has content more towards image based biometrics such as face recognition. The entrepreneurial skills workshop was presented in two major topics. The topics are about project management and how to start a new high-tech company. Both workshops are well-designed in this last workshop to help us, the fellows, preparing ourselves for the future after we finished our project within the BBfor2 framework.

This last meeting turned me a bit sad because of various reasons. I've learned so many things through this network. I've tasted lots of new experiences. I've met so many new friends through this meeting. The feeling of won't be able to see them regularly (we have meeting twice a year) are quite overwhelming. But life must go on, we have to keep moving forward and the project  has to end at some point.

Anyway, we're gonna meet again on the BBfor2 conference this autumn. So, there is no need to be too sad :)

BBfor2 Winter Meeting in Enschede, 2013

Gala dinner at the BBfor2 winter meeting in January, 2013.

Without even noticing, we've arrived at the last year of our BBfor2 project. One by one, fellows are leaving this project as their contract end. Though, the networking won't stop here. This winter, we have a meeting in Enschede, the Netherlands. We also have an interesting workshop on "Bayesian Network". The challenge on this workshop is to apply the Bayesian network in our work-case which can be tricky.