J. Bruce Millar

 

ANU Emeritus Faculty  - My time since retirement

I retired from my position as Senior Fellow in what is now the Research School of Computer Science in November 2006 and was created ANU Emeritus Fellow in 2010.

I have chosen not to accept any paid work from the ANU (or elsewhere) preferring to act in an honorary capacity.

I have accepted an honorary consultancy with the ANU Disability Services Centre in response to their call for expertise in the area of automatic speech recognition and through them have liaised with the international Liberated Learning Consortium in which some of my previous international colleagues are also involved.  I have attended their annual meeting, conveniently held in Sydney in 2011.

I have sought to package some of my intellectual property in which other colleagues have expressed an interest, and, by formal agreements with ANU, place this IP in the hands of trusted colleagues at other universities.  One such package contains the IP of an ANUTECH project from the mid-1990s relating to the authentication of computer users and this now resides at the University of Canberra under the care of my very first PhD student, Professor Michael Wagner.  Another such package contains the IP of an ARC project also from the mid-1990s in collaboration with three non-ANU partners relating to the creation and distribution of a data corpus of Australian English spoken language material and this is now under the management of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (of which I was a co-founder in 1988).

I have retained active membership of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (Life Member), the Acoustical Society of America (Emeritus Member), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (Life Senior Member), and the International Speech Communication Association (Fellow).

I continue to serve on one editorial board (of the international journal “Speech Communication”) and conduct occasional reviewing for that journal and for related conferences.  I have attended two international conferences since retirement, one by invitation to receive the Fellowship of the International Speech Communication Association.

I have continued a 20-plus year involvement on the Boards of Wycliffe Bible Translators (Australia) and Summer Institute of Linguistics (Australia) focusing largely on their training of volunteers to work with linguistically disadvantaged people groups in Language Development & Literacy.

I have served as a volunteer with the Belconnen Baptist Church focusing in my retirement more on outreach to seniors at a BUPA Residential Home and via a congregation that focuses on quiet reflection.  Together with my wife I have also joined a PROBUS club.

I am spending more time in my garden with vegetable growing and general maintenance, visiting children and grandchildren in Perth, Melbourne and Canberra, and in my office where I am trying to digitise as much significant material as I can from all areas of my life – to create a tidier collection and just maybe for posterity.