IEEE’s Xplore service is an important source of papers for electrical and computer engineers. However, its search feature is frustratingly poor.

Here is an example of how poorly the search works. In advanced search, I initiated a query for “speech analysis by homomorphic prediction” and I specified that I want the query to look at all data fields (this is the default). I wanted to find a paper by Kopec et al. that appeared in the IEEE Transactions in Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing. IEEE Xplore informed me that “no results were found.” I copied and pasted my search into Google, and I got this link as the first result. Note that when you click on the link you get to the IEEE Xplore page that lists the paper as “Speech analysis homomorphic prediction” without the “by” in the title. The paper title includes the “by” however, it was transcribed incorrectly by IEEE, but this would have been difficult for me to guess correctly. Xplore can’t deal with this difference. Google can. Clearly, we have the technology. So, IEEE, please fix the search feature in Xplore. In the meantime, I guess I’ll log in to Xplore but search in Google.

Andrew Kun

The Essence of Engineering and Meta-Engineering: A Work in Progress aims to define what Engineering is and how it is different from Science. The following quote have caught my attention:

The history of science is a graveyard of theories that were empirically successful for a time…

The article includes many references and quotations. It’s interesting to read how people used to define Engineering.

The technology for sharing the written word has improved dramatically over the centuries. Back in ancient Egypt, if you wanted to jot down your thoughts, you needed some serious hardware:

Those were the times of the Rosetta Stone. Now, in a recent Newsweek article Steven Levy discusses the idea of converting books to digital form, that is ripping books. The article focuses on the BookSnap device made by Atiz. And while Levy isn’t too impressed with the device (he thinks it’s expensive, bulky and could be more user-friendly), he warns that it’s a sign of things to come. The time when you’ll be able to fill up your “book iPod” with books from your library is fast approaching, he warns. I agree, and I’m pretty excited about it. It would be really nice to be able to search books, annotate them, copy quotes, etc. Not to mention read your books on an electronic reader.

Improvements to BookSnap are in the works. In fact, while BookSnap requires manual handling of pages, there are companies that make page turners, e.g. Pageflip. Combining such technology with scanning may provide low cost book rippers. Of course there are more serious devices out there too, like this one, but most of us couldn’t fit it into our basements (or budgets).

While we’re waiting for the cheap book ripping solution, we can download free e-books from the Gutenberg Project (and since the copyright on these books has expired in the US, we can freely share them too). The Gutenberg Project books come in plain text format, which can be read by e.g. the Amazon Kindle.

Andrew Kun

My grad student Oskar Palinko has written on this site about his work on a cool glove to be used as a press-to-talk (PTT) device. The glove has built-in buttons that can be used as PTT buttons when interacting with a speech user interface. We’re currently using the glove to test how drivers would benefit from a “floating” PTT button in vehicles. We’re also hoping to use the glove with handheld devices - the idea here would be to have a wireless headset tied to the handheld and the glove would provide the PTT button. Both the in-car application and the handheld application are ubiquitous computing applications (or pervasive or ambient computing applications, if you prefer those terms), thus I call the glove a ubicomp glove.

Many other researchers and companies are using gloves in various ubicomp settings. For example, there’s the cellphone glove by G-Cell. This glove, as the name says, is a cell phone:

Then there’s the iPod-controlling ski glove by Reusch.

The most interesting ubicomp glove I’ve come across is the control glove by Engineered Fibre Structures:

The company is a University of Manchester spin-off. It was started by two professors in the Department of Textiles. According to this post, you control devices by touching a finger to the thumb. This creates an electrical circuit with the conductive pathways that are woven into the fabric of the glove and triggers the transmission of a signal via the glove’s Bluetooth transmitter.

Andrew Kun

“Microsoft announced an unprecedented software program that we believe will help change the lives of millions of students around the world. The program, Microsoft DreamSpark, is focused on providing millions of college and high school students with no-cost access to the latest Microsoft developer (i.e., versions of Visual Studio, XNA Game Studio), designer tools (Expression Studio) and Microsoft platform resources (i.e., versions of Windows Server and SQL Server). ”

“Microsoft believes in the power of technology to transform education, and Microsoft DreamSpark is another avenue to help the next generation of young leaders seize the opportunity to harness the transformative ability of software. It’s our hope that Microsoft DreamSpark will help students tap into their creative potential and set them on the path to academic and career success. ”

“Currently, the program is accessible by college students in 11 countries including: Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the coming months, the Microsoft DreamSpark team will expand the program’s reach to include high school students and to increase the number of participating countries.”

Please go to the website and download your free software. You are required to have a Windows Live Id so, if you don’t have one you can create one for free. If you have any questions please contact me.

Jonathan Oppelaar

On February 18^th Go-First visited us for a presentation and demonstration of Project54. Noel Gould, co-founder of Go-First, has brought the group to visit the project for the past two years. Go-First is an organization that introduces young people to public safety, health, environmental and technological careers (with particular attention on first responder occupations) and engages them through hands on experiences provided by professionals within these fields. Nate Purmort, assisted by Matt Lape, introduced the project to the 19 students ranging in ages from 13-16. Nate did a great job explaining and demonstrating the project to the group. There were a few students that had been in the Go-First group from last year so they were already familiar with project54. After learning about the project the students were given the opportunity to try the system and then they were introduced to the driving simulator where they were able to experience driving while trying to use the computer simultaneously. Alex Shyrokov demonstrated the simulator with a number of driving scenarios and weather conditions. Of course being of ages 13-16 most of them had not driven before and it showed! It was a good group of kids and the time flew. Their next stop after visiting us was a tour of UNH’s Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) department. We look forward to having Go-First visit again next year.

To view photos of the visit go to www.flickr.com/photos/eceblogger

~Erika

Have you seen the 80s movie WarGames? Well, I’m old enough to have seen it in the movies. Here’s the trailer:

Here’s why I ask if you’ve seen this movie. Kent Chamberlin, Erika Clifford and I were discussing ongoing and future datacasting technology evaluations by Project54 at UNH. We’re interested in using datacasting in first responder operations. One aspect of the evaluations is finding out where, and under what conditions (weather, moving or stationary receiver, etc), can the datacasting signal be received. Here’s a post that discusses work using stationary receivers on how weather events are related to datacasting reception. We’re currently planning a study evaluating a technology that allows receiving datacasting signals while moving, e.g. in a car. We plan to install datacasting receivers in vehicles and create coverage maps for (parts of) the state of New Hampshire.

It occured to me that this planned activity is very similar to wardriving. Wardriving refers to driving in search of Wi-Fi networks. The result is the map of an area with Wi-Fi networks shown. Wardriving was named after wardialing, the term used in WarGames, that means dialing a list of phone numbers in search of lines hooked to computer modems. Here’s what this looked like in the movie:

So, should we use “wardriving” to describe data collection for our datacasting work? Or maybe find another term? Also, I wonder if there are any wardriving maps of Durham, NH?

Andrew Kun

Dr. Jenni Cook, Associate Professor in the UNH Music Department, visited my Speech Processing class to discuss speech production as it relates to the singing voice. Here’s a picture of Jenni I took during the lecture:

I invited Jenni because I was intrigued by a figure in the Quatieri textbook that I use in this course, and I thought she’d be the perfect person to bring this figure to life for us. The figure (a reproduction from a paper by Johan Sundberg) pictorially explains how singers can generate loud sounds, or using music terminology, how they can project well. In essence, the vocal tract has resonances, called formants. For so-called voiced sounds, the vocal tract is excited by periodic air puffs from the glottis. The frequency of the air puffs is the fundamental frequency of the voice. When the formants line up with the fundamental frequency, and/or its harmonics (its multiples in frequency), the singer projects well. Here’s the figure:

Jenni discussed this issue, as well as others, in her lecture. For me, the most exciting parts of the lecture were the demonstrations: Jenni sang short sequences to demonstrate various effects (including the one in the figure above), and she also had us participate in some of the demonstrations by vocalizing and by exploring the anatomy of our voice production mechanism.

Jenni has kindly agreed to help me in assigning a project topic for my Speech Processing course (each student will complete a project as part of the course). Jenni and I will work together on guiding a project on generating feedback to a voice student about how he or she is projecting while singing, as well as about other relevant features of his or her voice (we’ll determine which ones as the project gets going). The feedback will be based on digital speech signal processing algorithms and it will be presented in a user-friendly form to the singer. Should be fun!

Andrew Kun

… check out these geeky ideas.

Check out YourPND.com - they’re marketing a service that allows you to record your own navigation instructions to be used by a commercial navigation device. You can also have your spouse, a friend, or whoever else record the instructions. The service is currently only available in Dutch with an English version coming.

In his book Wired for Speech Clifford Nass points out that the type of voice (male vs. female, happy vs. sad, etc.) used by a speech user interface makes a difference in how people perceive the user interface and, by extension, how much they like and trust the device they’re interacting with. One key point made in the book is that people prefer voices similar to their own (this is the similarity-attraction effect). I’m not aware of any studies on how a user would react to a machine talking to him or her in the user’s own voice. How do people like such extreme similarity? I wonder if the YourPND people ran some user studies. If not (or if they’re not publicly available), this would be interesting to do.

Andrew Kun