Peter Bell

Roles: Prof Peter Bell holds a personal chair in speech technology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics and is a core member of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR). His primary research focus is automatic speech recognition (ASR), particularly in cross-domain adaptation, lightly supervised training, and minority language systems. He teaches the Automatic Speech Recognition course and advises multiple PhD students.

Research Interests: Prof Bell's work spans ASR system development for diverse domains, audio-visual integration, end-to-end models, and under-resourced languages. His projects include the CoG-MHEAR healthcare initiative and the Unmute project addressing language marginalization. He has pioneered techniques for speaker adaptation, raw-waveform modeling, and multi-task learning.

Commercial Activities: He advises industry on speech tech adoption, co-founded Quorate Technology (acquired by LSEG), and provides consultancy to firms developing speech solutions. His work bridges academic research with commercial impact through projects like the BBC's MGB Challenge and EU-funded SUMMA platform.

Grants & Projects: Leads EPSRC-funded CoG-MHEAR and Unmute initiatives, collaborates on IARPA MATERIAL for low-resource ASR, and contributed to the SpeechWave waveform-based ASR project. His research has been supported by Bloomberg, Ericsson, Samsung, and Toshiba.

Labs & Teams: Active in CSTR, leading teams in speech representation learning, adaptation techniques, and multi-modal ASR. His lab supports interdisciplinary work with NLP, HCI, and biomedical engineering groups.

Personal: A passionate hillwalker, he explores Scottish Highlands and Corbetts. Previously active in Edinburgh University Hillwalking Club, his outdoor pursuits reflect his disciplined approach to research exploration.