Just saw this on Groklaw. A leaked memo that probably shouldn't have been leaked, regarding Baystar's funding of SCO, and Microsoft's funding of Baystar. I wonder what the deal is here. These SCO people lose more and more credibility every day. I do hope MSFT isn't funding their legal escapades, cause I don't think anyone in their right minds would want to be associated with SCO these days (litigious bastards).
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.html
eWeek Article:
Leaked Memo Revives SCO-Microsoft Connection Furor
So I just attended a talk by Arthur Chan, formerly of SpeechWorks (now ScanSoft), who is now staff at Carnegie Mellon, and he's working on a new version of the Sphinx 3 recognizer (Sphinx 3.4). It's a very sophisticated approach using a tree-based lexicon (which improves speed, and marginally reduces accuracy of words that are slurred or cut off, since the language model cannot boost confidence scores with this approach), and a continuous HMM (Hidden Markov Model).
Results seem promising -- it is significantly faster than the original Sphinx 3 (which had trouble running in real time except on very very fast machines), for a marginal word-error-rate increase.
We'll need some testers and developers on this soon -- ping me if you'd like to play around with what will be, the best open-sourced (BSD license) recognizer around. I'll be extending a hand to help with this effort some too, though more so after I graduate and have more time to do so.
Kudos to Arthur, Ravi, and Jahanzeb for this effort! And yes, on my agenda in the future (6-12 months from now) will be Ariadne + Sphinx 3.x support. Too many things to do right now like graduating, going to Germany, then off to the Bay Area again (assuming I get offers from at least one of the two jobs I'm seriously looking at).
So I have a really good friend here at CMU, great guy, and needs an internship this summer. Please ping me via this blog if you are hiring for the summer and could use a CMU student who:
- Has a 4.0 in our computer science dept. (Only like 4 students a year can pull that off here).
- Is teaching a class on C# right now.
- Helped write a C++.net book published by Deitel and Deitel last summer.
- Has a great personality, super creative, awesome guy, and super enthusiastic.
I'm not posting his resume so he doesn't get spammed, but ping me if you've got anything interesting :)
I'll try and help him through my own contacts at IBM and elsewhere, too.
Thanks!