Andy Secker

Former News Labs Language Technology Lead
Graphic squiggles

Biography

Andy is a former Labber who led the Language Technology workstream for News Labs. Andy has a PhD in machine learning, was a successful academic, and prior to joining News Labs spent 8 years at BBC R&D.

Andy's work for Labs focused on the production of prototypes and tools for BBC World Service and he led a portfolio of projects predominantly centred around speech to text, automatic translation and text to speech technologies for non-English languages. He specialised in leading external research collaborations and transferring the output of these into the team. Andy co-authored 25 peer reviewed publications and has contributed to formal standards published by MPEG, DVB, ETSI, DTG and DUK.

Projects and blog posts

06 June 2018

Speeding up the BBC's speech-to-text pipeline

An apprentice tests new ways of cutting audio files to cut down on transcription time.
project

ALTO - a multilingual journalism tool

ALTO is a virtual voice-over tool for reversioning video content into multiple languages using text-to-speech voice synthesis
project

EuroVOX

Creating an open ecosystem for transcription and translation.
project

GoURMET - Global Under-Resourced MEdia Translation

Creating machine translation models for under-served and under-resourced languages
project

MT-Stretch

Improving neural machine translation through user corrections in real-time model updates.
project

SCRIPT: Speech Synthesis for Spoken Content Production

SCRIPT is a 3-year research and innovation project looking to develop synthetic voices for low-resourced languages.
project

SUMMA - Scalable Understanding of Multilingual MediA

Using a range of combined language technologies to support multilingual media monitoring.

Meet the Team

Alicia Grandjean

Senior Software Engineer

Ben Nuttall

Senior Software Engineer

Clare Spencer

Senior Research and Development Producer

Dave Bevan

Senior Systems Engineer

Jack McPoland

Software Engineer

Julie McManus

Senior Software Engineer

Lee Fuller

Software Engineering Manager

Manjiri Carey

News Editor

Marie Rasmussen

UX Designer

Miranda Marcus

Executive Product Manager

Philip Hatcher-Moore

Journalist

Sarah Rainbow

Senior Software Engineer

Sevi Sariisik Tokalac

Senior Research and Development Producer

Tom Francis-Winnington

Senior Software Engineer

Elsewhere on News Labs

news

A translation quality assessment by journalists for journalists

news

News for All: Delivering value in journalism

news

Salco 2023: Making news hyperlocal

Careers

Love data and code?

We'd like to hear from you.