Automatic Speaker Identification System for Urdu Speech

Speaker recognition is the process of recognizing a speaker from a verbal phrase. Such systems generally operates in two ways: to identify a speaker or to verify speaker’s claimed identity. Availability of valuable research material witnessed efforts paid to Automatic Speaker Identification (ASI) in East Asian, English and European languages. But unfortunately languages of South Asia especially “Urdu” have got very less attention. This paper aims to describe a new feature set for ASI in Urdu speech, achieving improved performance than baseline systems. Classifiers like Neural Net, Naïve Bayes and K nearest neighbor (K-NN) have been used for modeling. Results are provided on the dataset of 40 speakers with 82% correct identification. Lastly, improvement in system performance is also reported by changing number of recordings per speaker

Understanding the needs of Pakistani farmers and the prospects of an ICT intervention

This paper describes initial efforts in the form of a user research phase as part of a larger project to provide ICT based interventions to farmers in Pakistan to facilitate information dissemination. We conducted face to face interviews with 9 Pakistani farmers and 3 agricultural experts. Our main results show that mobile technology is present but under utilised, a strong peer reliance network exists and most information and media modalities are inaccessible. We relate the results obtained to design implications and future work

From the margins to the centre:defining new mission and vision for HCI research in South Asia

Abstract The past two decades have seen an increase in the amount of research in the CHI community from South Asia with a focus on designing for the unique and diverse socio-cultural, political, infrastructural, and geographical background of the region. However, the studies presented to the CHI community primarily focus on working with and unpacking the regional contextual constraints (of the users and the infrastructures), thus taking a developmental stance. In this online workshop, we aim to broaden the perspective of the CHI research and community towards the contributions from the region including and beyond development, by bringing together researchers, designers, and practitioners working or are interested in working within these regions on diverse topics such as universal education, global healthcare, accessibility, sustainability, and more. Through the workshop discussion, group design activity, and brainstorming, we aim to provide a space for symbiotic knowledge sharing, and defining shared visions and missions for HCI activities in South Asia for including and moving beyond the development agenda