Ireland - One of those leading the work (an electronic stethoscope) at University College Dublin is Dr. Scott Rickard, a US scientist with a sparkling academic pedigree in applied mathematics and electrical engineering. As an expert in audio identification techniques his work brought him to the attention of the FBI, where he helped develop an eavesdropping technology to identify a speaker's location in a crowded room.
Using two closely spaced microphones, it was possible to separate and localise an arbitrary number of speakers. "So if you were in a room and 10 people were speaking, you could tell who said what, when," said Dr Rickard. "That is really important for the FBI - they have lots of recordings of people and they want to know what was said and who said it." (more)
