Equation editing in Word 2007 is a new feature (no more Insert Object), but it needs some serious work before it’ll be OK to use. The first real problem I had with it was not being able to save my document as a .docx file when I added equations. I was editing an existing file, I added equations, hit save, and I got a save-as dialogue box (?!). I entered a new name, and eventually got an error message (?!?!?!). So, I saved the file as a Word 2003 document and the equations turned into ugly images (not editable any more).

OK, so I needed to keep adding equations to the file and I decided I’ll just save the document as a .docx, add equations, and potentially end up with images again. But, when I saved my .doc file as .docx, my original equations changed back from images into editable equations again (!?!?!?!??!?!?). Looking at Explorer, I now have a 2003 file with editable equations. Wheneven I hit save, I get this message:

However, the equations are still there!!! This level of unpredictability really worries me.

Other annoying “features”:

• You can’t delete an exponent only. You have to delete the whole expression (e.g. you can’t make a “z” from “z^-1″ without deleting the entire “z^-1″ and retyping “z”).
• If you want to delete an exponent, and realize that you’ll have to remove the entire expression, you may be tempted to first write down the new exponent-less expression or variable and then delete the one with the exponent. This won’t work. As you keep hitting delete Word will select the newly added variable. Thus, changing “z^-1″ to “zz^-1″ and then deleting the “z^-1″ part won’t work. You have to delete first, then add the new expression. Aggravating.
• If you want to add an equation in a new line, you can’t just hit “enter” while editing the equation. You have to click outside the equation.
• If you insert an exponent expression, or a bracket, the cursor is positioned outside the expression/bracket. Of course, if you inserted an exponent expression, you’re likely to be trying to enter something into this expression, e.g. the base! So now you have to click on the appropriate field and only then start typing. Wasteful.
• Word allows showing the sum operator limits below and above the operator. However, when I selected this option, the limits showed up next to the sum operator (top and bottom). When I later hit new line, the limits moved below and above the sum operator. I don’t exactly understand how to control this and that’s not good.

So, be careful if you have to add equations to a Word 2007 file and you use the built-in equation editor. It needs significant improvement. For another (perhaps a little angrier) look at Word 2007, read this post.

Andrew Kun

In the March issue of Spectrum, Robert Lucky writes about a report by the National Academies which indicates that the long-term prospects for US global competitiveness are threatened by trends in our educational system and our economy. Now the chairman of the committee responsible for this 2005 report, Norman Augustine, has written a shorter version of the report. You can download it here.

The trend in the US educational system that’s cause for concern is that our schools are not turning out sufficient numbers of students who have the math background to even consider engineering and science careers. The trend in research funding has been for industry to abdicate its responsibility for funding research and for the federal government to underfund research. According to Lucky, “industry now spends three times as much on litigation in the United States as it does on research.”

Why does all this matter? Because the prosperity we enjoy in the US is largely due to our economic power (I won’t get into discussions about political systems which clearly have a lot to do with prosperity). But our economic power is threatened by the troubling double trends of fewer engineers and scientists in the pipelines of our schools and pinched research funding. Our economic power needs nurturing and the way to nurture it is to improve K-12 education in math and sciences and to increase funding for research. (We at Project54 try to help out with K-12 education by hosting school groups: see e.g. this post and also this post.)

Btw, I think that one thing that our K-12 education could use is a decreased stress on organized sports. That should free up some money to pay good math (and music, English, science, art, etc.) teachers and time for students to study academic subjects. Physical activity is important and should be encouraged, but teams, cheerleaders, banners, away games… How exactly do they contribute to education? They’re pretty much just fun activities. Fun’s a good thing, but America’s K-12 students clearly need some help with their homework first.

Andrew Kun

Susan Boyce of Tellme visited the Project54 lab and gave a talk entitled “Designing for voice search.” The talk touched upon several Tellme projects, including 1-800-CALL-411, a service that allows callers to search for businesses, buy movie tickets, etc. Impressively, 75% of incoming calls to this number are handled completely by the Tellme speech software, without any human help. This is of great importance to Tellme, because clients who deploy directory assistance (or similar) voice systems pay only for calls that are fully handled and not handed off to a human operator.

Susan pointed out that companies such as Tellme (a Microsoft subsidiary), Yahoo and Google compete heavily in the mobile world of voice search. They all believe that, as mobile phones get more powerful and data plans become cheaper, mobile phones will take over from laptops as the primary gadget that’ll let you get driving directions, buy tickets, order pizza, etc. Actually, since Domino’s is a Tellme client, you can already download an application for some cellphones that’ll let you order pizza with the click of a button (or a voice command). You can even order the “usual” - not bad!

Susan also talked about the multimodal nature of mobile phones: user interface designers can take advantage of the phone’s display for information output while allowing you to talk to the phone for information input. Not having to rely exclusively on speech for information output is nice in many applications, for example when you’re asked to select an item from a list (e.g. a business from a list of close matches to your query).

After the talk Susan had a chance to check out our driving simulator and continue the conversation about speech interfaces with several of my students.

Thanks for visiting Susan and for giving a great talk!

Andrew Kun

Project54 participated in UNH’s Exploring High Technology Day today. We had 3 groups of 23-ish high school visitors come to the lab for a demonstration of the project. We had students from Londonderry, Bow, Newmarket, Portsmouth and some home schooled students. Andrew Kun, Project Director, introduced the project. Nate Purmort, Engineering Manager, explained the nuts and bolts of the project and gave the students hands-on demonstration of the system’s push to talk technology. Andras Fekete, graduate student, demonstrated the use of the handhelds and how they will be used in the field once deployed. Undergraduate student Mark Taipan highlighted the value of working in a program where he can apply what he learns and get paid! He also touched on his research project involving P54 and video cameras. Grad student Oskar Palinko set up and demonstrated our simulator’s newest feature, the eye tracker. Alex Shyrokov and Zeljko Medenica, also grad students, presented the simulator giving the students a variety of driving experiences including a snow storm. You would think we have had enough of the snow already! The demonstrations went well and we had 3 great groups of students. The students were involved, interested and had some thoughtful questions. It is the norm for students when trying out the simulator to perceive it as a giant video game, however, it is always nice when they recognize, or in this case ask the question, “how does this (the simulator) fit in with the project?”!!

Alex demonstrating the simulator and its value for researching distracted driving.

Oskar explaining the EyeTracker and its use for researching the visual habits of people while they are behind the wheel.

All in all it was a great day and we were thrilled to be part of it. We look forward to seeing some of these students in the future as UNH undergrads!

~Erika

OK our dog Bingo needs this, since we have little time to play with him these days due to the arrival of our daughter, Julianna.

[via Gizmodo]

Andrew Kun

In response to this post by Robert Scoble, there are at least two wikis on obsolete skills. One is obsoleteskills.com run by Brad Kellett, and the other is this wiki on wikispot.org. Talk about quick response, Scoble’s post went up on February 16, 2008, which is a little over a month ago!

One obsolete skill that I mentioned the other day in my Speech Processing course is using log tables to speed up multiplication by hand. Now, the wiki entry says this skill went obsolete in the 1960s, but I learned it in elementary school in the late 1970s or early 1980s, so the entry must be wrong In fact, I even learned how to use the slide rule, another obsolete skill, which in turn uses logarithmic operations. Here’s a nice slide rule from Wikipedia:

Anyway, the reason this skill came up was our discussion of the complex cepstrum and its use of the log operator to transform the multiplication of transfer functions into the addition of these transfer functions.

Andrew Kun

The UNH ECE Department organized a social for faculty and grad students. Turnout was great and so was the pizza.

Check out more pictures from the event here (thanks for operating the camera Oszkar!). 

Andrew Kun

Wired Magazine’s online edition has a couple of blog posts about Microsoft Research’s TechFest, an annual internal event that allows MS researchers from around the world to meet and share ideas in Redmond, WA.

One of the Wired blog posts is about the so-called Soundless Audio Lab, that is an acoustic anechoic chamber, located at the Redmond offices of Microsoft Research. The researcher describing the lab to the Wired blogger is Ivan Tashev. Ivan’s research interests include microphone arrays, which is one reason for his involvement with the anechoic chamber. Ivan is also involved in developing in-car speech interfaces, e.g. the Commute UX technology that provides location based services via telephone, which he presented at SigDial 2007 (here’s the paper).

Andrew Kun

Project54 is mainly comprised of graduate students completing their theses in a variety of fields from mapping applications to speech interaction. Undergraduates here at the University of New Hampshire can be exposed to research as well. One of research opportunities presented to undergraduates is the Student Research Undergraduate Fellowship grant. This grant allows students to submit a research proposal and if selected, work on it for ten weeks over the summer. Project54 undergrads Matthew Lape and I, under the direction of Project54 Director and UNH ECE Professor Andrew Kun, just submitted our proposal called KLAS: The Kingsbury Location Awareness System.

This is a proposed prototype for a location based digital assistant for academic buildings at the University of New Hampshire Durham campus. KLAS will contain two main components, the location awareness system and the user-interactive software. The location awareness system will be comprised of a sensor network of IEEE 802.11 access points and passive RFID tags. The 802.11 access points will be used for a general region location detector (e.g. half a hallway) and the RFID passive tags will be used for specific positioning (e.g. office and classroom doors). The user-interactive software, which will be developed using the Project54 PDA Software Framework, will contain two main facets, a dynamic tour guide and an indoor mapping application. The user will be able to use a PDA with this KLAS software on the 2^nd floor of Kingsbury Hall (the main engineering building at the UNH Durham Campus).

The following video is a proof of concept of the KLAS indoor mapping application. It depicts a user using the indoor mapping application and through audio interaction, getting from an ECE lab in Kingsbury Hall to the ECE Office.

Mark Taipan

While I’ve written with enthusiasm about Amazon’s Kindle (here) and about ways to digitize books to feed to your digital book reader (here), Jason Epstein, co-founder of On Demand Books, thinks this is not the future of books. In a Technology Review article he points out the Kindle’s flaws. First of all, it is very expensive. Your first book will cost you $400 (price of Kindle) + $10 (price of downloaded book) = $410. He also argues that imitating the real thing by creating paper-like displays misses the point. Why not print the real thing? On Demand Books intends to deploy ATM-like devices that’ll allow you to do just that: print a copy of a book from an electronic file at the point of sale.

I understand where Epstein is coming from. I just recently finished reading a thesis proposal that a student sent me and I didn’t read it on my monitor, I printed out all 35 pages and read it from the paper copy. However, On Demand Books will not help you search a book, highlight passages, and enter them in another document you’re working on. It won’t allow you to edit a document you’re collaborating on with someone else. And it won’t allow you to share a document wirelessly with a friend over a cup of coffee. This is where a future version of Kindle or a similar machine will come in. Add the electronic paper display which does not strain the eyes, and you have a winner.

In an excellent article recounting his career, Epstein proposes that his company’s ATM-like book printing machines would be a great way for the 47 million Americans whose native language is not English to buy books. I agree! I keep trying to buy books in Hungarian (especially now that I’d like to read to my daughter in Hungarian in the hopes that she’ll be bilingual), but that’s not an easy thing to do. On-line ordering is my best bet, but selection in the US is limited while shipping costs from Hungary are exorbitant.

My guess is that currently both electronic book readers and the ATM-like book printers can get a share of the market. However, in the (vaguely defined) long run, I would bet on electronic book readers.

Andrew Kun