Self-introduction
Hello, everyone. I’m Rubén, from SILS at Waseda. I specialise in phonetics, particularly in speech technologies and forensic phonetics. At the moment, I lecture in Spanish as a Foreign Language, phonetics and foreign accent. I very much enjoy teaching to motivated and driven students, so I try to do my best in the classroom in order to make the experience fulfilling for everyone.
As a grade student, I mixed science with linguistics from an early stage. I have always found fascinating how what can be considered as “opposite” disciplines can be so intertwined. I really think that learning in a context, with a wide view of the world out there, can make a difference in the minds that will shape our tomorrow.
In that line, I always try to introduce my topics in connection. There is so much computers, AI and acoustics can do for a linguistics student of any discipline (phonetics, syntax, language learners, etc.). Let’s try and find a productive way of applying our knowledge to make a better world!
Recent Research Interests
[The phonetics laboratory at Waseda University]
At the moment my focus is in foreign accent. This means that I look into the interaction of different languages and how that interaction affects production and perception of speech. My ultimate goal, therefore, is to teach machines to identify a foreign accent efficiently, so human-computer interaction can be optimised. I have spent the last few years researching English-Spanish and Japanese-English interaction, but there are still a lot of languages to match. Hopefully, with a bit more research we can extract some general ideas that could lead to machine-meaningful generalisations about foreign accent.
Profile
I got my degree in Spanish language and literature from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2010. Afterwards, I started working at the Natural Language Processing industry (2010-2013) while I got a M.Sc. in speech technologies (2010-2011) and a postgraduate degree in forensic phonetics (2011-2012). I moved to the Basque Country, in the north of Spain, with a national grant to complete my PhD (2014-2019), and I worked for an AI company (2018-2020). In 2020 I was awarded a fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, with which I worked as a fellow researcher at Waseda University for two years (2020-2022), where I stayed as a researcher in the advanced institute (2022-2023) and, currently, as an assistant professor (2023-?).
