Ah what a joyous February
Hopefully I'll be able to incorporate some of the techniques I learn from this class into future programs I write.
Also, this month, aside from being really frigid, has been very good to me! I get to go to two joyous weddings in March, and I may also get the chance to meet Ken Rehor, one of the original creators of VoiceXML.
I also had a few job interviews lately, one with Amazon.com (which had quite a comedic end to it -- I think the recruiter was probably laughing when she got my email after the interview -- needless to say, I don't want to work there), one with BeVocal (which went very well and I liked a lot), and I may have one with Scansoft soon, too. Looks like the jobs are out there -- don't lose faith for all of you who are looking :) And if anyone out there needs help, I have contacts at lots of companies, especially on the west coast.
I am also getting plans ready for a trip to Germany after school ends in March! Should be the perfect respite before starting work. Not to say that I don't have some business planned to do there soon.
At school, we had a fantastic talk about RFID from one of the Vice Presidents of SAP Labs' research center in Palo Alto -- I'm going to try and schedule an in-person chat with them over spring break.
I do believe a Mr. Bill Gates is coming to CMU in a couple weeks -- will be quite interesting to hear what's on his mind. Maybe I can find a plush penguin to give him as a thank-you-for-visiting.
I'll be out in San Francisco from March 6th - 13th,. and would love to chat with any of the bloggers out in the bay area -- especially would love to chat with the now famous Mr. Robert Scoble. Robert, would you care to do lunch or dinner that week and have a nice chat about the future of lots of technologies, from speech to RFID to user interface design?
There's also a lot of behind the scenes things going on with me in the dialogue systems world :)
The one bit to share is a great way of explaining what I'm working on (Special thanks to my dear friend Lauren at Pitt for help on coming up with this):
Think of the speech recognizer as your ears. Think of the text to speech engine as your brain. Think of the dialogue system as your brain. I work on the brain :)