Speech Interface Group

Recent development in the Speech Interface Group include:

May 26, 2004: Joseph did it! He made the deadline for graduation, and here you can see him and Chris after signing his thesis. Congrats! Check out his thesis web page, which comes with a cool video. We wish you good luck and all the best back in Boise, and I am pretty sure some time in the future we will all visit you there! Yup, that's what I think. ;-)

February 18, 2004: David is leaving us! Already! These were really short eight months. We wish him the best for his remaining time as a student in Israel. You helped us a lot, man! Thanks! :-) On this pic, you see him and the speech grads at our farewell dinner.

October 29, 2003: A pirate with a parrot sitting on his shoulder interrupted not only one, but two presentations from Chris, during the Digital Life and Things That Think fall sponsor meetings!? Who the heck is this guy, talking to on the cellphone? More about these incidents later...

September 12, 2003: Hello Joseph, Zeynep, and Assaf! We have some brand new members: Zeynep and Assaf start as Master's students, and Joseph contintues to work with us as an M.Eng. student. Welcome to the Speech Interface Group! :-)

August 14, 2003: ¡Caramba! Gerardo is so done! After two years, having worked very hard on Impromptu and his thesis project ListenIn, he returns to his native Mexico and will live there happily ever after... Congratulations! BTW, guess wich pill he chose, the red or the blue one... ;-) Wise decision!

July 7, 2003: Gerardo presents paper at the 2003 International Conference on Auditory Display, Boston, MA, USA, July 6-9, 2003. During the Q&A, he defended himself successfully against a privacy(-over)-concerned audience! Good job!
July 2, 2003: Today, David Spectre, a cool industrial designer, arrives at the Lab! He will stay with the Speech Interface Group for eight and a half months, and will introduce himself soon.

June 28, 2003: This was Vidya's last day at the Media Lab: we will miss her sooo much! :-( I can't believe it is already two years! Anyway, good luck to her back on the West Coast! Here's the cool video she made for her thesis project SimPhony, starring most of the Speech Group members!

May 19, 2003: Mark started today. During the summer, he will be working on animatronics and robotics stuff, and reverse engineer the face control of our interactive storyteller toy. Here's his report, including some videos. And here's how Chris looked like after he found out what we are working on...

October 10, 2001: Chris demos Impromptu! Watch the video of Chris' talk where he demos Impromptu, Kwan and Jang's cool project. This was during the Fall 2001 meeting of I:O. (In order to watch this video, you need a RealPlayer.)
September 7, 2001: Kwan did it! He graduates from MIT with a Master's degree. Congratulations!

September 4, 2001: Welcome Ivan, Vidya, Gerardo, and Jang! The Speech Group has four new members: Vidya, Gerardo, and Ivan are our new Master's students, and Jang contintues to work with us as an M.Eng. student (he has worked before with Kwan as a UROP). Soon they will add more information about their backgrounds, interests, etc.

Apr 4, 2001: Lisa, Barry, and Chris will present a paper at CHI 2001: The Audio Notebook: Paper and Pen Interaction with Structured Speech.
Jan 1, 2001: Nitin leaves Speech Interface Group.
Sept 26, 2000: Natalia presents a paper at HUC 2000: Location-aware Information Delivery with comMotion. HUC2k was held at the HP Laboratories Bristol.
Sept 14, 2000: Chris talks at MediaLabEurope MLE.
Sept 1, 2000: Sean becomes Eircom fellow. Cool!
Aug 11-16, 2000: Speech Group workshop at Eircom in Ireland.
Jul - Sept 2000: Sean is in Ireland for the summer, doing an internship with Eircom.
Jul - Sept 2000: Stefan is in Tokyo, at the IBM Tokyo Research Lab. He was working on making Aglets open source. Here is his personal diary about his activities there.
June 5, 2000: Natalia talks at the The Sixth Annual Workshop on Frontiers in Distributed Information Systems FDIS, Aspen. The talk is about comMotion, and this is the powerpoint presentation.
Feb 7, 2000: Ben Raymond Schmandt is born! Congratulations to the parents! Here's Ben's photo page.
Feb 7, 2000 CHI2000 workshop: Nitin's and Sean's workshop submission about Aware-Portals is accepted. Congratulations!
Sept 13, 1999 Telecom Italia Fellwoship: Natalia becomes Telecom Italia Fellow 1999/2000.
Fall 1999 Hello Kwan! :-) Kwan Lee joins the Speech Interface Group as a Master's student.
Aug 24 1999 Motorola Fellowship: Stefan Marti selected as Motorola Fellow 1999/2000.
June 28, 1999 Keith graduates and leaves for WRL: Keith has graduated from MIT and has left the Speech Interface Group to work at WRL in Palo Alto. Best luck to you, man! We had a really cool time here!
June 8, 1999: Chris talks at The Fifth Annual Workshop on Frontiers in Distributed Information Systems FDIS in Aspen. The subject is "Acitve Mobile Computing" (Powerpoint presentation).
May 18, 1999 CHI 99: Natalia, Nitin, and Chris are at CHI 99, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The conference is from May 15th til 20th at David Lawrence Convention Center Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The Speech Interface Group members are presenting comMotion (poster) and Nomadic Radio: Scaleable and Contextual Notification for Wearable Audio Messaging (long paper and talk 14:30-16:00) [ slideshow ].
Apr 27, 1999 Perspectives Talk: Chris Schmandt asks Get the Message? at the Media Lab 1998-99 Perspective Series (shown live on the Internet).
Jan 22, 1999 Stefan wins contest! With impressive 8.34 seconds, Stefan wins the AIAA 14th Annual Paper Airplane Contest, category Longest Time Aloft. There were also prizes for Longest Distance and Most creative Use Of Paper. Stefan, shortly after his victory, "I am so happy to win this award. After 33 years investing time and creative energy in making paper airplanes, finally my life starts to make sense." Congrats, Stefan!! :-) [ Photo published in the Tech Talk Feb. 3, 1999 ]
Jan 18, 1999 New Speech Group student: Sean Wheeler starts in our group as a new Master's student. We all wish you a good start and good luck!!
Nov 23-27, 1998 Wearables Tokyo: Nitin Sawhney demonstrates Nomadic Radio at the Wearables Symposium at Niccograph'98, Tokyo. [ Poster ]
Nov 9, 1998 AT&T Fellowship: Stefan Marti selected as AT&T Fellow 1998/99.
Nov 5, 1998 PUI '98 Workshop: Nitin Sawhney and Brian Clarkson present a paper at the Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces, San Francisco, Nov. 5-6, 1998.
Nov 3, 1998 UIST '98 Talk: Chris Schmandt presents the Audio Hallway at UIST '98.
Oct 30, 1998 Web Launch: Speech Interface Group launches first website!
Oct 28, 1998 BT Fellowship: Nitin Sawhney selected as British Telecom Fellow 1998/99.
Oct 21, 1998 Wearcon 98: Nitin Sawhney talks about Nomadic Radio at the International Symposium on Wearable Computing in Pittsburgh, PA. [ Presentation Slides ] and [ Real Video ].
Sep 1998 Pagers-r-Us: Speech Group adopts pagers for enhanced communication. Thanks to Pascal Chesnais and his Canard project, all the Speech Group members have a new toy: a Motorola PageWriter 2000. With this 2-way pager, the group can remain connected and utilize a number of asynchronous remote services within the Knothole infrastructure developed by Stefan Marti.
May 1998 Everest Adventure: Natalia sets-up base camp on Everest

What's new on this website:

March 16, 2005: Updated the web page search function. It now finds ALL files, especially all the new PDFs we made of our older papers, going back to 1978. And yes, although the PDFs are scanned from papers, we did OCR on them, so you can search them for their content!
May 21, 2001: Added a search function on the Speech Group entry site. Indexed are not only .html files, but also Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Microsoft Word (.doc), and even Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt). Our large papers section can be searched much easier now.
March 7, 2001: Updated the papers section. Besides having nice thumbnails, it contains now a list of ALL papers that were ever written by Speech Interface Group members. However, we don't have electronic versions of all papers. So if you happen to have files that can be linked, please let Stefan know!
Feb 7, 2001: finally updated this news page.
Dec 10, 1998: new group picture on the Speech Interface Group people page.
Nov 25, 1998: new project page Audio Hallway added.
Nov 15, 1998: new project pages NewsComm and VoiceNotes added.
Nov 11, 1998: project page GarblePhone updated.
Nov 9, 1998: project page Synthetic News Radio updated.
Nov 3, 1998: links on people page Stefan Marti added.
Nov 1998: home page for Audio Notebook updated.