Current Workshops

Look on our past workshops page to see all the workshop DSI/DSAIL has supported since 2017

Welcome to the annual FACTOR Summer School, running 0930-1445 on both Thu 11th and Fri 12th June 2026.

Language, Speech, and AI: An Online Forensics Summer School

So, you know how you've been thinking over and over, "God I wish I could just spend two days immersed in nothing but language, crime, and artificial intelligence”…? Lucky for you, we have exactly what you've been looking for: tickets for our 2026 Forensic Linguistics and Speech Science Summer School have just gone on sale. What are the odds??

Better yet, this year we're going global by running it all online. And as if that wasn't enough, you will be pleased to know that we won't be trying to wedge eighteen hours of content into eight hour days.

We assume no prior knowledge, start and finish at commitment-friendly hours, work at a gentle pace, and provide lots of opportunities for interaction, Q&A, coffee breaks, and checking your phone. But what will we actually do?

This year’s particular theme will be protection, privacy, and proactive synthesis.

In different words, we’re looking at questions like: is it possible to protect our voices from malicious actors who might want to clone us whilst still being recognisable to people around us? And further along the scale, can AI keep our identities fully withheld in sensitive contexts such as when we’re giving anonymous tip-offs, providing evidence in risky criminal proceedings, or even working undercover? And how much of our linguistic output do we need to think about when attempting this? We’ll start the summer school with interactive experiments and bring you back the results by the end. What will those experiments be? Well, you’ll have to attend to find out more.

Note that if you attended the in-person event in 2025, to keep it inclusive and accessible, we recap some of the same basic concepts, but then we move into new territory.

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