Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a forefront of technology and research today. The effectiveness of ASR depends upon the accurate and quick classification of phonemes, which are the basic building blocks of speech. To derive such a classifier for phoneme classification in the context of ASR is the subject of my MASc thesis at the University of Waterloo carried out in between April 2011 and July 2012 under the supervision of Professor Fakhreddine Karray. Drawing upon several recent research topics applied to this area, such as discriminative learning and locally adaptive metrics, a novel...