Alice Ross

such a pleasure! thank you so much (and all the CHM colleagues!) for the warm welcome 🤩

Super grateful to be visiting the Forschungsbereich Mensch und Maschine / Center for Humans and Machines this week in their incredibly cool home @mpib-berlin.bsky.social 🤩 huge thanks for all the good thoughts and questions at the lab meeting today!

Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, 20th-22nd August, 2025 Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

V proud to say I'll be presenting our work on trans men's vocal style-shifting and metalinguistic awareness next month at LavLang 31 @lavlang.bsky.social!🪻🌈💬
If you like LGBTQ things, linguistics, or Manchester, you should come too!

lavlang2025.wordpress.com

as ever, thanks to my brilliant co-authors: @mxeddie.bsky.social @catlai.bsky.social and @greatlikecheese.bsky.social who actually DID the phonetic analysis that I'm reporting on here 🙇‍♀️ all stars!

I think this is the biggest screen my work's ever been shown on (...so far?!) #UKIS2025 at University of York last week. It was wonderful hearing about the varied and inspiring work everyone's been doing - especially on York's own YorVoice project 💬💜

Excited (and also nervous) to present our project on trans men's vocal style-shifting at UK and Ireland Speech next week 🥳 I'll be in Oral Session A, on Monday afternoon, please be nice if you're there 🙂‍↕️
sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/u...

"classifications do not just describe people’s experiences of the world but normatively construct the world they claim to describe": the great @kevinguyan.bsky.social writes about 'inclusion' and what gets flattened, miscategorised, made incomprehensible or just left out

“In the Colony of Blooded Eyes: A Trilogy on Working Conditions as a Content Moderator in Germany” is a raw and honest account by Sakine Mohamadi Bozorg on the realities faced by migrant content moderators in Germany.

... and to all the interviewees, who were a delight!
The paper presents a mixed-methods study exploring phonetic features of trans men's speech in different contexts, along with qualitative interviews about their voices, experiences and metalinguistic awareness. I'm really proud of it!

Delighted to say I'll be presenting my work on 'Conveying gender through speech: insights from trans men' at @interspeech.bsky.social 2025! Huge thanks to my excellent coauthors @greatlikecheese.bsky.social, @mxeddie.bsky.social and @catlai.bsky.social 🏳️‍⚧️🗣️💜

An Island of Strangers In response to Keir Starmer

"There is an island of strangers in Westminster. Most of them have never known the bonds that strangers can form."
Richard Lighten's beautifully written response to Starmer rjaylighten.substack.com/p/an-island-...

the "is this a pigeon" meme, showing a confused anime guy labelled 'NYT tech editor' looking at a butterfly labelled 'bullshit machine' and asking 'is this deserving human rights?'

i am so weary of this discourse

Ok so now @nytimes.com is considering the big questions like "does Gemini deserve human rights". Rather than "do data workers, who are in fact humans, deserve human rights" 🤦

interesting! 'tenacity' feels low frequency enough that I can definitely believe I'd regularise just because it's kinda hard to access, but that doesn't apply for strength (imo)

A screenshot of white text on a black background, from the instagram account @nifmuhammad. The text reads: Cruelty is one crises that is built from several other crises and one that I have been thinking of recently is A Deficit Of Wonder, which exists not due to a lack of moments of wonder for humans to bask in, but what seems, to me, like a refusal to locate and engage in wonder, a refusal to offer one's close attention to the world. There is a level of individualism embedded in this of course, which is another interconnecting crisis. Treat the world like an assignment you, individually, have to get through and/or conquer, and it makes sense that you would ask a computer what you should wear with a sweater you like. It makes sense that you would turn your face away from the vastness of space to promote some songs.

Hanif Abdurraqib (over on ig in this instance), consistently making me nod and think and cry in a good way.

if you're in Edinburgh and not stuck in a training session all day you should go see what my extremely cool colleagues have been up to at @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social tomorrow! (11 April) (can we guess who is stuck in a training session all day) 😘

I was recently required to submit a CV in Word (🤢) and in a truly inspired move I wrote "Here's my CV [url and QR code linking to my CV]" in a word document and submitted that. I did not get the job, but I DID get an interview so I don't think it was entirely due to the sass 💅

haha nooo 🥲 Uri you could never!

raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimised by Reviewer 2 ✋✋✋✋✋🖖✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋✋🤟✋✋✋✋🖐️

פּונקט אזוי!! 🫠

😮🥹🥰 pal!!! thank you!

(as a silly aside: the label that best fits me is probably 'genderfluid' but I don't like the NB flag colours 🫢 which kinda makes me feel aligned with all my trans friends who hate the pastel baby aesthetic of theirs. no flags no fixed categorical identities no masters no borders, imo)

Ari presented this work at SLT in Macao in December, and we'll be talking about it at a couple of different things in Edinburgh shortly too - UoE friends hmu for info! 🏳️‍⚧️💛🤍💜🖤

Beyond The Binary: Limitations and Possibilities of Gender-Related Speech Technology Research This paper presents a review of 107 research papers relating to speech and sex or gender in ISCA Interspeech publications between 2013 and 2023. We note the scarcity of work on this topic and find tha...

something that I'm proud of! I co-wrote this with Ari Sanchez and @ninamarkl.bsky.social because I got mad at the start of my PhD when I started reading up-to-date papers on speech science/technology and they said things like "the two genders" 😂🥲🫠
doi.org/10.1109/SLT6...

Oohhh interesting, think the only scholarship I've seen that relates to this is on video game development (but that doesn't mean there isn't more, as we all know there is so much I have not read)

some good news! 🍉

"My view is that AI cannot be ethical if it’s trained immorally, by exploiting people in economically difficult areas, like people in the global south."
Mophat Okinyi of Techworker Community Africa on AI labour practices in @superrrnetwork.bsky.social's Ding magazine dingdingding.org/issue-7/inte...

can confirm, the vibes are horrific in between bouts of being entirely hypnotised by @shannonvallor.bsky.social's marvellous cat 👁️👁️

as a postgraduate student, I cannot overstate how depressing it is to (repeatedly) find myself in a classroom full of thoughtful, studious humans who have been reading, writing and thinking for years pre-LLMs, and have someone stand up at the front and utter the words "here's what ChatGPT said"

Language Mechanics: Language, Computers and Power

GenAI devalues teaching and learning: just two of the brilliant @ninamarkl.bsky.social's top 10 reasons to keep GenAI out of our university work
languagemechanics.neocities.org/no-gen-ai