PhD Defence of Phat Do

It’s time for our colleague Phat to defend his PhD thesis! We warmly invite you to celebrate this exciting milestone in his academic journey.

Phat's research

Phat is giving voice assistants like Siri a Frisian twist with his dissertation, "Praat mar Frysk (mei amper data): Speech synthesis for low-resource languages with cross-lingual transfer learning". While speech tech thrives in major languages like English and Chinese, Phat proved it can work for small languages too. With surprisingly little data, he built two speech models that can pronounce Frisian sentences—an exciting step for minority languages.

Using clever training methods—like starting with Dutch before switching to Frisian—he created models with as little as 20 minutes of Frisian audio. The results are promising and freely available. Though still in development, Phat’s work shows that even small languages can join the tech conversation.

Details

Phat will defend his dissertation on Thursday, 19 June 2025. The defence will start with a Laypeople’s Talk at 10:30, followed by the official ceremony at 11:00.

The event will take place in the auditorium of the Beurs building, Campus Fryslân (Wirdumerdijk 34, Leeuwarden), but can also be followed online via the following link.

We hope to see many of you there to support and celebrate with Taís!