Fourth year undergraduate student, Brett Squires, applyied machine learning to the problem of identifying a person from the characteristics of a sentence spoken into a microphone. This was successfully demonstrated and later work was applied to a security system based on this method. Andrew Taylor also taken up this approach to identify bird, frog and whale species for environmental research.
Publications
Squires, B. and Sammut, C. (1995). Automatic Speaker Recognition: An Application for Machine learning. In A. Predietis & S. Russell (Eds.), Twelfth International Conference on Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann.