Professor Frantz Clermont PhD (Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University) is a speech scientist whose research and teaching background straddles phonetic science, signal processing, pattern recognition, statistical modelling, and computational algorithms. This cross-disciplinary background stems from pre-doctoral engineering study in the USA, doctoral training in Australia, and postdoctoral research work at the University of New South Wales (Australia), the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (Canada), the University of Tsukuba (Japan), Lund University (Sweden), and the forensic speech and acoustics laboratory at J. P. French Associates (UK). He is currently a visiting professorial fellow in the Speech and Language laboratory (forensics stream) at the Australian National University.
Prof Clermont has been engaged for over 25 years in basic and applied research related to the following areas of speech science: (1) phonetically-motivated parameterisation of the acoustic speech signal; (2) characterisation of formant and cepstral variability within and between speakers; and (3) quantitative modelling (phonetic & statistical) of this variability for enhancing automatic speech and speaker classification. He is now leading research projects on forensic voice comparison, whose long-term aim is to empower the cepstral parameter (mainstay of speech signal processing) with the flexibility to scan the full-band spectrum for sub-band regions of strong speaker sensitivity.
Prof Clermont has published widely on the above topics in international conferences and peer-reviewed journals. He is a reviewer for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, a foundation member of and reviewer for the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.