Aaron Lawson

Assistant Laboratory Director, Speech Technology and Research Laboratory (STAR)

Aaron Lawson, Ph.D., is Assistant Director of SRI International’s Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. His research interests include voice forensics and biometrics, language and speaker identification from speech, social media information extraction, noise robustness, and fielding systems.

At SRI, Lawson is the co-PI of the SAVI team for the DARPA MediFor program and is SRI transition lead for the DARPA RATS program. He currently leads the Human Language Technology project with JHU Applied Physics Lab, Forensic Speaker Recognition projects with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and transition efforts with the Navy and Special Operations Forces. He was PI for SRI’s LinguaKey team for DARPA Active Authentication. Past projects include IARPA REYNARD and BEST.

Prior to joining SRI, Lawson was a research scientist at Air Force Research Laboratory/RADC in the Audio Processing Group. Earlier, he was a natural language processing researcher at TextWise, LLC.

Lawson has published more than 30 papers covering speech, natural language and linguistics. His Ph.D. in applied linguistics is from Cornell University.

Recent publications

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Toward Fail-Safe Speaker Recognition: Trial-Based Calibration with a Reject Option (1/1/2019) - The output scores of most speaker recognition systems are not directly interpretable as stand-alone values. For this reason, a calibration…

Robust Speaker Recognition from Distant Speech under Real Reverberant Environments Using Speaker Embeddings (9/1/2018) - This article focuses on speaker recognition using speech acquired using a single distant or far-field microphone in an indoors environment.…

Analysis of Complementary Information Sources in the Speaker Embeddings Framework (9/1/2018) - Deep neural network (DNN)-based speaker embeddings have resulted in new, state-of-the-art text-independent speaker recognition technology. However, very limited effort has…