About me

My name is Xiaoran Yu (于筱然), I go by the name Daisy in the English-speaking world. I am a PhD student in the CDT in Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh, also with the Centre for Speech Technology Research in the School of Informatics. Under the supervision of Prof. Hao Tang and Prof. Sharon Goldwater, my research involves automating linguistically meaningful measurements from speech signals, with the aims of improving its robustness and adapting to human feedback on the fly. The broader goal is to develop data-driven methods for characterising key factors to speech intelligibility.

Previously, I obtained my integrated Master’s degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from Imperial College London. My final year project was on automatic speech recognition for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing speakers, supervised by Prof. Patrick Naylor. I also spent three months at the Fourier Transform Spectroscopy Lab led by Prof. Juliet Pickering, developing neural networks for spectral line detection in complex atomic spectra with Dr Milan Ding and Sean Lim.

Educations

  • 09/2025 - Present, PhD student, University of Edinburgh, UK
  • 10/2021 - 06/2025, MEng, Imperial College London, UK

Academic interests

  • speech and language processing
  • machine learning
  • linguistics

Other interests

  • british sign language
  • football
  • guitar

Friends