The propagation of light is always dependent on the colour of the light, yet researchers at the NLC have shown that it is possible to control light in a manner that is independent of its colour (wavelength) [Optics Letters vol. 37, pp. 49 (2012)]. This surprising result is expected to impact on techniques to encode information in the colour of the light (e.g., wavelength multiplexing in optical fibres) and in high-precision manufacturing with broad wavelength femtosecond lasers.

Building databases of speech audio files and text transcriptions for under-resourced languages plays a pivotal role in developing speech technologies for these languages. This paper describes an open-source tool for devices running the Android operating system to facilitate the efficient collection and quality control of speech data for automatic speech recognition system development.