Sam Kirkham
@samkirkham.bsky.social
650 followers 590 following 39 posts
academic at @phoneticslab.bsky.social :: speech production, vocal tract imaging, dynamical systems, computational modelling :: https://samkirkham.github.io
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samkirkham.bsky.social
✨Discovering dynamical laws for speech gestures ✨

➡️ I’m delighted to announce my new article out today in Cognitive Science, where I discover simple mathematical laws that govern articulatory control in speech.

🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

@cogscisociety.bsky.social
samkirkham.bsky.social
I'm afraid not! I've seen 2 cameras but not the mirror. It sounds like it's worth a go though!
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
justinjhlo.bsky.social
And you can hear all about Nosey, nasalance and 3D printing (and mysterious bonus content??) from @samkirkham.bsky.social on Tuesday afternoon (A02-O3)!

📄 www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
justinjhlo.bsky.social
Pat Strycharczuk will be presenting our paper at #Interspeech2025 on Wednesday afternoon (A02-O6), where we applied forensic speaker comparison methods to ultrasound tongue imaging data to think about the individuality of articulatory strategy

📄 www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...
samkirkham.bsky.social
Very happy to have been awarded an APEX grant for a project on “Interpretable acoustic-articulatory relations in speech production” w/ co-investigators Anton Ragni & Aneta Stefanovska. The plan is to do some interesting speech research at the intersection of linguistics, physics & computer science!
britishacademy.bsky.social
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 APEX Awards, granted to ten researchers to pursue innovative, interdisciplinary research. The awards are supported by the @leverhulme.ac.uk and delivered in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering and @royalsociety.org: buff.ly/eF30SQq
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
esseeohteetee.bsky.social
Presenting some stuff from my dissertation at this cool workshop in a couple weeks on dynamical models of speech: samkirkham.github.io/dymos/

Doing a lot of reading/prep work as I am the "symbolicist" going to talk to a bunch of "dynamacists". Should be fun! (seriously)
Dynamical Models of Speech
researcher in phonetics at lancaster university
samkirkham.github.io
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
esseeohteetee.bsky.social
Here are my slides: www.scott-nelson.net/Presentation...

I started my talk by saying, “usually when you’re a phonologist who is interested in phonetics you get more concrete but I decided to get more abstract instead.” If that’s of interest to you then you might be interested in checking these out!
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
lauriewired.bsky.social
MLX, Apple’s machine learning framework, just merged a CUDA Backend.



Matmul, tensor copy ops, and other core CUDA primitives are now part of Apple’s official build.



There’s a lot of hype + confusion.

Here’s what it is, and…isn’t.
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
cdminix.bsky.social
More details on this soon! Also this weekend is the last chance to submit your TTS system for the next round of evaluation (Q2 2025) by either messaging me at [email protected] or requesting a model here: huggingface.co/spaces/ttsds...
cssd-bot.bsky.social
Christoph Minixhofer, Ondrej Klejch, Peter Bell: TTSDS2: Resources and Benchmark for Evaluating Human-Quality Text to Speech Systems https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19441 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19441 https://arxiv.org/html/2506.19441
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
jofrhwld.bsky.social
Introducing the tidynorm package! It's got convenience functions for applying your favorite vowel normalization methods to point measures, formant tracks, and DCT coefficients in a tidyverse workflow, as well as a flexible framework for defining your own normalization methods!
Introducing tidynorm – Væl Space
Here’s a brief introduction to the new tidynorm package.
jofrhwld.github.io
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
mpipks.bsky.social
🐠🦠Why can’t bacteria swim like fish?
At microscopic scales, physics changes — viscosity rules! Researchers at our institute study how microbes like E. coli overcome this challenge with clever strategies like run-and-tumble.

Watch our new video:

youtu.be/drwCRRD7CGY?...
Tiny swimmers
YouTube video by MPIPKS
youtu.be
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
karlrolson.com
There's a lot of big news today/this week, but Apple just dropped a nuke of a paper about LLMs & LRMs, specially around "high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse." This is the biggest sign yet that if AI ever lives up the hype, it won't be via those approaches:
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes…
machinelearning.apple.com
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
avisalli.bsky.social
🚨 PhD call in Neurosciences @UNIMORE_univ is open!
Join our Cognitive Neuroscience & Psychology lab in Reggio Emilia 🇮🇹 – a vibrant, livable city.
We study cognitive control, perception-action links & social cognition using EEG, behavioral, mathematical & computational modeling.
🧠👇
Call for admission to PhD Programmes - 41° cycle - A.Y. 2025/2026
www.unimore.it
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
lancslinguistics.bsky.social
We are very excited that Samuel Schmück has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a great project on speech analytics and under-represented language varieties in speech technology. Many congratulations Sam!

@samschmueck.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk
Sam Schmück awarded Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship - Lancaster University
Congratulations to Sam Schmück for being awarded a highly prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship!
www.lancaster.ac.uk
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
takayukinagamine.bsky.social
Hot off the press! My tutorial on ultrasound data collection & analysis is now out. Open Access. Part of a special issue in the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, with lots of other cool studies. Articulatory phonetics is going strong in Japan!

www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/onse...
Quantifying Between-Speaker Variation in Ultrasound Tongue Imaging Data
This article outlines a quantitative, between-group comparison of tongue shapes using ultrasound tongue imaging, one of the vocal tract imaging techni …
www.jstage.jst.go.jp
samkirkham.bsky.social
And also a paper accepted at CogSci 2025! ✨

➡️ Phonetic accommodation and inhibition in a dynamic neural field model
arxiv.org/abs/2502.01210
samkirkham.bsky.social
We have two papers accepted at #Interspeech2025! ✨

➡️ Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance
arxiv.org/abs/2505.23339

➡️ Articulatory strategy in vowel production as a basis for speaker discrimination
arxiv.org/abs/2505.20995

+ I'll also be giving a survey talk!

See you in Rotterdam! 🇳🇱
Reposted by Sam Kirkham
awrench.bsky.social
Glossogram with dark red indicating constriction and blue diagonal (tongue compartment contracted) demonstrating peristaltic transfer of water bolus from oral-pharyngeal. This is easiest to explain as sequential extension of neuromuscular compartments of the tongue.
samkirkham.bsky.social
GitHub integration, versioning (although I don't think it shows version diffs), DOIs, guaranteed by EU/CERN. It is a bit more complicated (lots of options) and I don't think it has anonymous repos like OSF. But it seemed best for long-term storage + you can see the file directory on main page...!
samkirkham.bsky.social
Me too - I've started to host more things on Zenodo instead.