Prime time for Distributed Speech Recognition? February 23, 2009

While an undergraduate student a few years ago I worked on Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR). The main purpose of DSR is to compress the acoustic features used by a speech recognizer, over a data (instead of voice) network, thus saving bandwidth (cost effective) and allowing the use of full speech recognition in mobile terminals. As it compresses acoustic features for speech recognition (not speech signal transmission/reproduction) purposes it can achieve very low bit rates. You can think of it as analogous of what mp3 is for music transmission and storage.

Depicted next is a simple overview of a DSR architecture (model 2). Note that the mobile terminals depicted are Symbian’s reference devices corresponding to smartphone, handheld and PDA respectively (Ooops too old images – it should be back in 2001; should upgrade to something like iPhone or Android …)

My work with Prof. V.Digalakis concluded that one can successfully take advantage of DSR with only a 2 kbps coding, which is an extremely low data rate. After that i ported the DSR engine to a Zaurus Linux PDA and made it work in real-time (a 16MB, 200 MHz StrongArm processor).

Although my recent work focus is now on Multi-modal (speech) interfaces I still keep an eye on DSR. It seems that with the emergence of powerful mobile terminals and the announcement of speech recognition support for Android and iPhone by Google, DSR might become soon a hot topic!

P.S. I just found out my DSR page is ranked 3rd by Google after W3C and ETSI. Holy moly!

Coolness factor: ?

The year of Augmented Reality February 23, 2009

Wikitude AR Travel Guide

Untill now there was too much hype around augmented reality since except for some really cool demos and research prototypes no real end user apps existed. Well, it seems that with the emergence of power mobile devices, augmented reality will find it’s way to the public with mobile users to be the first. Wikitude Android App is one of the first ones, with many more following this year.

Coolness factor 5/5!

My 15 minutes of fame! March 11, 2008

Our work in Telecommunications Lab, at Technical University Crete (TUC) was featured in “Orizontes” documentary series of Kydon TV channel. We demonstrated some of our demos :

• My work on multimodal interfaces (part of my PhD), including a travel. reservation multimodal (GUI + speech) application running on a Zaurus Linux PDA
• The automatic video summarizer system (part of MUSCLE NOE european research project showcases).
• An audio-visual (AV) recognition system (also part of MUSCLE NOE european research project showcases).
• The multi-mic robust speech recognition demo (part of Hiwire european research project showcases).

We could not showcase the augmented-reality demo, we developed in cooperation with VTT (speech recognition integration), since we currently miss the appropriate hardware, hope we get it soon.

Some of these demos will go public, either by posting videos on YouTube or by releasing the source as open source in Sourceforge/Google code.

More on this as well as a more detailed description of the demos in following future posts!

Stay tuned!

Aibo, Lego mindstorms, Wii remote (wiimote), iPhone & Google’s Android! March 11, 2008

What all these have in common? They will be my playground for a while …

I will have the chance to play with all of them during this samester!

As far as aibo and mindstorms are concerned, i will use them for the two robotics related courses i have enrolled in. Some possible projects I am thinking of :

• Distributed speech recognition (DSR) : enchance the limited speech recognition capabilities of the aibo by exploiting the wireless link and a  speech recognition server.
• Distributed image processing : enchance aibo’s limited machine vision capabilities by exploiting the wireless link and a machine vision server (similarly to DSR)
• robot localization using multiple input modalities : machine vision + audio
• enchanced gesture based interface or multimodal (speech + gesture interfaces)

Wiimote hacks for enchanced HCI, similar to these demos from CMU.

iPhone will be used,  to augment my speech & GUI multimodal interface prototype already  running on the Zaurus PDA, with the gesture modality.

Finally, i can’t resist from playing with Google’s  new Android platform,  for porting  various apps  I have in mind.

Whoa, my hacker alter ego will be definetely be back for good!!!

 

gaming tech update January 19, 2008

Sure, i was an addicted game player during the glory days of the Amstrad 6128 era, but this was almost two decades ago! Doom and Quake were the hits of the mid 90s, that is more than a decade ago. Recently, a friend of mine got this Wii device to play with his dad (OK he needed some fun after finishing his PhD). I was sure i would never spend again my time gaming, but now i might reconsider …

I came across this impressive PS3 eyetoy demo. The graphics realism left me wondering … these ducks are absolutely cool!

Apart from the graphics, the interesting part is in the interaction techniques. Wii I guess is the leader in this area with Wii Fit and Wii Remote (wiimote). Wii remote uses accelometers, motion and optical sensing! Both are too impressive, gamepads are over!

coolness factor : 5!

Augmented reality rocks! January 19, 2008

During MMSP 2007 conference,  I came along with an augmented reality demo, which i tried out and it was really fun. I tell you, augmented reality will soon become a very hot topic, specially for mobiles.

Two impressive augmented reality demos in youtube :

An introductory demo about the technolgy
The total immersion demo, really cool!

coolness factor : 5!

Opera prepares for version 10? July 29, 2006

According to this C|net article, Opera prepares version 10 of it’s successful browser.

Wow, it’s not a long time since I updated to version 9. Opera is the ONLY non-open source program I use on my Linux boxes for many years now! It combines rock-solid functionality with an excellent interface.

I really like it’s simple yet intuitive and extremely configurable interface.
(Well in terms of design, it reminds me of Google’s simple interface – simple is beautiful!)
Opera was one of the first apps to use mouse gestures and they have also build a multimodal-enabled version in cooperation with IBM (should test this sometime on my Zaurus)

It’s standard-compliant and it’s blazing fast (compare to pre-firefox mozilla days) and secure (vs IE).I have got 5000 opera bookmarks & a big mailbox and I can quickly find anything in msecs!

In terms of functionality, a jabber IM plug-in would make it almost complete!

<The company expects version 10 to work on and across any platform>
I have already Opera running on my Zaurus PDA and my K700 mobile! – Opera mini is really cool! This gives a strategic advantage for Opera. I think desktop browser wars don’t matter any more, mobile browsing is the next frontier.

<Opera is aiming for a day when people needn’t use a full desktop operating system, instead using a browser and Web applications for most tasks>
This is another cool idea, especially for the mobile space, browser is the computer! And this widget idea is really promising, especially for the mobile space.

<There is also a big push in the company toward creating developer tools>
Attracting developers to it’s already small but dedicated community would be a huge plus. Go for it Opera!

These Norwegian trolls are really cool!

Coolness factor : 4.5

Trolltech releases Qt Jambi! July 28, 2006

Trolltech just released Qt Jambi, a java library for the desktop version of QT. Development with QT & QTopia (QtEmbedded) had been a really exciting experience for me in the past (well that was 2002; with my QtJim QTopia jabber client). It was a cool paradigm shift away from Swing’s mess of that time.

Sometime in 2005 i ported Qtjim to SWT in just a day! I found SWT to be also extremely nice as an API. And yes, i am still waiting for those SWT bindings for Qt/Qtopia (SWT uses Gtk bindings). Some people also proposed that IBM buys Trolltech, so it seems Jambi was a way for Trolltech to fight back!

Now, i think it’s really nice to use the power of Qt directly from Java. I recall how painful, the porting of an AWT application to Zaurus was : I had to fight different QT bindings for CVM/J9 and the worse part is, i could not use the OpenZaurus ROM (had to stick with Sharp’s original or TheKompany’s ROM).

But will Jambi be a success or just add fragmentation?
Well, time will tell

pros :

• exposes excellent QT, to java programmers (java on desktop might get finally real )

• eliminates jvm-vendor QT-bindings lock-in

cons :

• Only for J2SE 5!! (the real usefulness would be for the embedded space, trolltech folks! – hope they make it for embedded too!)

coolness factor : 4.25!