I’m David Ferris. David is a very common name, and so I often end up in organisations with multiple Davids. I dare not lay claim to Prime Davidhood, and I am not a “Dave” - there is a certain casual blokiness within it which doesn’t fit me - as such, I go by “Vid”.
I studied Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. My thesis project was an English-language Text-to-speech synthesis system in MATLAB. After that I worked as a Research Officer at the University of Queensland’s node of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, or CoEDL. There, I worked on social robotics and speech technologies for low-resource languages. I also worked on applications of Topological Data Analysis to rat neural data and human-computer interaction data on a collaborative grant with the University of California, San Diego, and the US Air Force.