Congratulations to Manuel Otero Gonzalez (from Laboratorio de Fonética del CSIC and La Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) – Audias) for winning the Oxford Wave Research IAFPA Best Student Acoustic/Automatic Paper award in the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) 2026 conference.

Together with his co-author Aurora Lopez Jareno, he presented “A comparison of the performance of humans versus deep neural networks in speech deepfake detection” a work that combines acoustic and automatic analysis. We hope this award can contribute to supporting his research journey.

Special thanks to the judging panel who made this possible.

Oxford Wave Research are delighted to be named partners of with the recently opened Centre for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (CFPA) at the University of Zurich. Opened on the 6th March 2019 the CFPA brings together research from a range of fields to address all areas of voice recognition in relation to forensic investigation.

Led by Prof. Volker Dellwo this centre will combine world-class research into forensic speaker recognition, voice disguise and voice line-ups with forensic services such as speaker profiling, speaker comparison, transcription, audio authentication and audio enhancement for both prosecution & defence.

As all great collaborations should, this one started with a few nice glasses in 2017 in Zurich.