Research Achievements

(*) indicate shared first authorship

Journal papers

1. Halpern, B. M., Tienkamp, T. B., Rebernik, T., Son, R. J. J. H. van, Visscher, S. A. H. J. de, Witjes, M. J. H., Abur, D., Toda, T. XPPG-PCA: Reference-free Automatic Speech Severity Evaluation with Principal Components. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. 2025;1–14. Pre-print
2. Tienkamp, T. B., Rebernik, T., Halpern, B. M., van Son, R. J. J. H., Wieling, M., Witjes, M. J. H., de Visscher, S. A. H. J., Abur, D. Associations Between Acoustic, Kinematic, Self-Reported, and Perceptual Measures of Speech in Individuals Surgically Treated for Oral Cancer. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 2025-7-8;68(7):3069–89.
3. Feng, S.*, Halpern, B. M.*, Kudina, O., Scharenborg, O. Towards inclusive automatic speech recognition. Computer Speech & Language. 2024-3-1;84:101567. (Pre-print is called Quantifying bias in Automatic Speech Recognition) Paper Pre-print
4. Tienkamp, T. B., Rebernik, T., Halpern, B. M., Van Son, R. J. J. H., Wieling, M., Witjes, M. J. H., De Visscher, S. A. H. J., Abur, D. Quantifying Articulatory Working Space in Individuals Surgically Treated for Oral Cancer With Electromagnetic Articulography. J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2024-2-12;67(2):384–99. Paper
5. Halpern, B. M., Feng, S., van Son, R., van den Brekel, M., Scharenborg, O. Automatic evaluation of spontaneous oral cancer speech using ratings from naive listeners. Speech Communication. 2023-4-1;149:84–97. Paper
6. Tienkamp, T. B., van Son, R. J. J. H., Halpern, B. M. Objective speech outcomes after surgical treatment for oral cancer: An acoustic analysis of a spontaneous speech corpus containing 32.850 tokens. Journal of Communication Disorders. 2023-1-1;101:106292. Paper
7. Halpern, B. M.*, Feng, S.*, van Son, R., van den Brekel, M., Scharenborg, O. Low-resource automatic speech recognition and error analyses of oral cancer speech. Speech Communication. 2022-6-1;141:14–27. Paper

Conference proceedings (oral)

Please note that Interspeech there is no difference in prestige, and quality between oral and poster presentations, however I separate it as this is often asked for. All of the below are peer-reviewed publications.

1. Halpern, B. M. (O), Tienkamp, T., Rebernik, T., Van Son, R. J. J. H., Wieling, M., Abur, D., Toda, T. Relationship between objective and subjective perceptual measures of speech in individuals with head and neck cancer. Interspeech 2025. ISCA; 2025. p. 3733–7. Pre-print
2. Halpern, B. M. (O), Toda, T. Reference-free automatic speech severity evaluation using acoustic unit language modelling. Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in Asia Workshops. Auckland New Zealand: ACM; 2024. p. 1–5. (AWARD) Pre-print
3. Halpern, B. M. (O), Tienkamp, T., Huang, W. C., Violeta, L. P., Rebernik, T., De Visscher, S., Witjes, M., Wieling, M., Abur, D., Toda, T. Quantifying the effect of speech pathology on automatic and human speaker verification. Interspeech 2024. ISCA; 2024. p. 3015–9. Pre-print
4. Huang, W. C.* (O), Halpern, B. M. (O)*, Phillip Violeta, L., Scharenborg, O., Toda, T. Towards Identity Preserving Normal to Dysarthric Voice Conversion. ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). 2022. p. 6672–6. (Hybrid conference, virtual oral and physical oral was done by separate person) Paper

5. Halpern, B. M. (O), Fritsch, J., Hermann, E., van Son, R., Scharenborg, O., Magimai-Doss, M. An Objective Evaluation Framework for Pathological Speech Synthesis. Speech Communication; 14th ITG Conference. Online: VDE Verlag GmbH; 2021. p. 1–5. Paper

6. Illa, M.*, Halpern, B. M. (O)*, Son, R. V., Moro-Velazquez, L., Scharenborg, O. Pathological voice adaptation with autoencoder-based voice conversion. 11th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW 11). ISCA; 2021. p. 19–24. Paper
7. Halpern, B. M. (O), Son, R. V., Brekel, M. V. D., Scharenborg, O. Detecting and Analysing Spontaneous Oral Cancer Speech in the Wild. Interspeech 2020. ISCA; 2020. p. 4826–30. Paper
8. Halpern, B. M. (O), Kelly, F., Van Son, R., Alexander, A. Residual Networks for Resisting Noise: Analysis of an Embeddings-based Spoofing Countermeasure. The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop (Odyssey 2020). ISCA; 2020. p. 326–32. Paper

Conference proceedings (poster)

1. Tienkamp, T. (O), Rebernik, T., Halpern, B. M., van Son, R., Wieling, M., Witjes, M., de Visscher, S., Abur, D. Associations between acoustic, kinematic, self-reported and perceptual based measures of speech in individuals surgically treated for oral cancer: 2024 Motor Speech Conference. San Diego, United States; 2024. Poster
2. Halpern, B. M. (O), Huang, W. C., Violeta, L. P., van Son, R. J. J. H., Toda, T. Improving Severity Preservation of Healthy-to-Pathological Voice Conversion With Global Style Tokens. 2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU). 2023. p. 1–7. Pre-print
3. Zhang, Y. (O), Zhang, Y., Halpern, B. M., Patel, T., Scharenborg, O. Mitigating bias against non-native accents. Interspeech 2022. ISCA; 2022. p. 3168–72. Paper
4. Prananta, L., Halpern, B. M., Feng, S., Scharenborg, O. (O) The Effectiveness of Time Stretching for Enhancing Dysarthric Speech for Improved Dysarthric Speech Recognition. Interspeech 2022. ISCA; 2022. p. 36–40. Paper
5. Tienkamp, T. (O), Rebernik, T., Halpern, B. M., Abur, D., van Son, R., de Visscher, S., Witjes, M., Wieling, M. Quantifying changes in articulatory working space following oral cancer treatment: 8th International Conference on Speech Motor Control. Groningen, The Netherlands; 2022. p. 193–4. POSTER
6. Halpern, B. M., Kelly, F. (O) Can DeepFake voices steal high-profile identities? IAFPA. Prague, Czech Republic; 2022. p. 80–1. ABSTRACT POSTER
7. Wildenburg, K. (O), Halpern, B. M., Rebernik, T., Tienkamp, T., van Son, R. J. J. H., Witjes, M., Wieling, M. Automatic Speech Recognition and Error Analyses of Dutch Oral Cancer Speech. Young Female Researchers Workshop. Incheon, Korea; 2022. POSTER
8. Monen, J. S. C. (O), Halpern, B. M., Tienkamp, T., Rebernik, T., Van Son, R., Witjes, M. J. H., Wieling, M. Automatic Detection and Severity Estimation for Oral Cancer Speech. Young Female Researchers Workshop. Incheon, Korea; 2022. POSTER
9. Rebernik, T. (O), Halpern, B. M., Tienkamp, T. B., Jonkers, R., Noiray, A. The Effect of Masking Noise on Oral Cancer Speech Acoustics and Kinematics. Groningen, The Netherlands; 2022. p. 179–80.
10. Halpern, B. M. (O) , Kelly, F., Alexander, A. Speaker-informed speech enhancement and separation. IAFPA. Marburg, Germany (Online); 2021. PPTX PDF

National (Local) Conferences

1. Halpern, B. M (O) XPPG-PCA: Reference-based speech severity evaluation using principal components. CREST Coaugmentation Symposium. Nagoya, Japan; 2025. SYMPOSIUM WEBPAGE

Preprints

Halpern, B. M., Rebernik, T., Tienkamp, T., van Son, R., van den Brekel, M., Wieling, M., Witjes, M., & Scharenborg, O. (2022). Manipulation of oral cancer speech using neural articulatory synthesis. Paper

Grants

1. Principal Investigator of “I don’t sound like myself”: Creating voice conversion-based speech technology for Healthcare, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Dutch Research Council Organisation), 2024-2026, 150,000 EUR (26,000,000 円)

Doctoral Thesis

Halpern, B. M. (2022). Making speech technology accessible for pathological speakers. University of Amsterdam. PhD Thesis Recording of the defense

Master’s Thesis

Halpern, B. M. (2018). Sparse Bayesian Regression for Identification of Gene Regulatory Networks. Imperial College London. Master’s Thesis

Awards

1. Best Paper Award - SpandLDeteriorate Workshop, ACM Multimedia in Asia (MMAsia).
2. 3rd place in VPRO AI Song Contest  Singing voice synthesis for our music AI Song Contest Webpage Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Peer-reviewing activities

• Academic Journals
  1. Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing
  2. IEEE Transactions on Speech, Audio and Language Processing
  3. Universal Access in the Information Society
  4. IEEE Access
  5. IEEE Signal Processing Letters
• International Conferences
  1. ITG Speech Communications
  2. Interspeech
  3. Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop
  4. Speech Synthesis Workshop
  5. Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (Crash Review)
  6. IEEE Conference on Acoustics Audio and Signal Processing
• Grant Panels
  1. SPI-Fondecyt - Chile Proposal

Academic Society Membership

• ISCA

Academic Society Activities

• Doctoral Consortium Member - Interspeech 2024 Doctoral Consortium Event Event page

Media Presence

• VPRO Web Series on AI Song Contest (2020) AI Song Contest Webpage Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
• Life, the university, and everything under the COVID lockdown (2020) Article

Papers where my contribution is acknowledged

1. Tóth, R., Barth, A. M., Domonkos, A., Varga, V., & Somogyvári, Z. (Year?). Do not waste your electrodes – principles of optimal electrode geometry for spike sorting. Paper
2. Kavoosi, A., Toth, R., Benjaber, M., Zamora, M., Valentın, A., Sharott, A., & Denison, T. (Year?). Computationally efficient neural network classifiers for next generation closed loop neuromodulation therapy – a case study in epilepsy. Paper