4th Meeting Open-Source Speech Recognition Initiative
MINUTES
Date: May 27-28, 2004 starting 00:01 GMT
Location: OSSRI listserv


Attending
DIRECTORS:
Ivan Uemlianin
John Dowding
Christophe Gerard
Dustin Wish
Jessica Hekman
Susan Cragin
Tristram Metcalf
Ed Suominen

ABSENT: Volker Kuhlmann

MEMBERS:
Bruce Cyr
Scott Carr

Agenda Items:

1. Adoption of the Agenda

No objections. Passed by consensus.

2. Welcome of new members and listserv report.

New Members:
Scott Carr
Mark Ungewitter
Current Members:
Mark Kyes
Turner Rentz III
Saravana Krishnamurthy
Alfred Dayton
Dennis A. Beckley
Bruce Cyr
Juan José García Rojo
Eric Johansson
Arthur Chan

UNKNOWN STATUS --
Bruce Couper -- Will be deleted from membership roster unless I get his address.

CLERK'S NOTE: For non-members who wish to become members, you must "ask" to be a member, and send me (Susan) your name and address. Membership carries with it annual-meeting voting rights and certain responsibilities, and for Mass laws I have to know your real name and home address. Priscilla? Julie? Joe? Others I have forgotten?

Listserv Report:
As of this morning, there were 54 subscribers:
37 non-digested and 17 digested.

Welcome new members.
Welcome / hello again.

Incorporation:

OUR PAPERWORK WAS JUST NOW COURIERED TO THE MASSACHUSSETTS SECRETARY OF
STATE. WE ARE INCORPORATED AS OF THIS VERY MINUTE. (OR POSSIBLY TOMORROW A.M., DEPENDING ON THE TIME STAMP.

John: Very good news. Thanks for all the effort you've put into this.
Tris: Yea Susan,, Today is tomorrow's memory and tomorrow is today's hope, just as yesterday's was! ;()

3. New Business:

Item #1:
Submitted by Christophe Gerard,
Seconded by Ed, Ivan
Modified and seconded by Susan

Establish Task Forces and Committees with purposes as follows.
(1) Task Forces formed to accomplish specific tasks and then dissolve,
headed by a Champion. These should meet as frequently as needed and
should contain a time horizon in their task.
(2) Committees to accomplish more general or long-term goals, headed by
Chairmen.
(a) Standing Committees - such as Finance, that are more or less
perpetual (there should be few of these, and they should meet either
monthly or as-needed)
(b) regular Committees - such as to advance a particular but more
general goal, such as product engineering or a specific fund-raising
target. These committees can discuss how they do business.

VOTE:
Yes - Ivan John Christophe Dustin Jessica Susan Tris
Member votes - Bruce Cyr, Scott Carr
COMMENTS:
Ivan: If anyone volunteers to Chair either of these, I vote YES to
their establishment.
Scott Carr: Agree that we need to have committees set up for these various areas.


Item #2:
Establish the following Task Forces:
(1) Product Marketing (to address our immediate needs of product
requirements),
(2) Product Engineering (to address Engineering product specification
and deliverables)
Discussion should include who volunteers and is working on those issues.
(3) Technical Evaluation - Champion: Ivan Uemlianin; Members currently
Arthur Chan, Christophe Gerard; Goal: to produce evaluation reports of
currently available free/open-source ASR software, first drafts
deliverable next meeting (i.e. next after 27th May).

VOTE:
Yes - Ivan John Christophe Dustin Jessica Susan Tris
Member Votes: Yes - Bruce Cyr, Scott Carr

COMMENTS:
Ivan: Yes to (3). I would vote YES in principle to (1) and (2), but
doesn't establishing a taskforce entail associating the taskforce with a
human? Is there any point in having an unmanned taskforce? If anyone
volunteers to Champion either of these, I vote YES to their establishment.
Dustin:
(1)Marketing via search engine placement and web marketing.
(2)Again website links, sourceforge projects, news and updates. Discussion should include who volunteers and is working on those issues.
(3)Should be published on our website.
Ivan to Dustin: Agreed, at least in principle, but: (a) maybe not the first drafts; (b) we should settle copyright and licensing (e.g. copyright Ossri under the GNU FDL).
Bruce Cyr: "Product Marketing" might the one semi-technical area where I could help.
Scott Carr: I can volunteer for this TF.
Ivan to Scott: Christophe and I are currently reviewing Sphinx 3 (Christophe) and SphinxTrain (me), and preparing short reports. If you're interested in reviewing another of the available systems (list at
http://www.iau.ukfsn.org/projects/devel/asr/ossri/survey.html) let us know. Especially relevant are the CMU SLM toolkit, ISIP and JULIUS.
Tris: (1) some product needs would come from accessibility sites / sources (2&3) More power to you all.
BruceCyr: (3)I don't want to impede good work, but I wonder if the two of you have worked out, or will work out subsequently, a protocol for the things you are looking at and how you will compile your reports -- something that might help Scott?

Item #3:
Establish the following Committees
(1) Standing Finance Committee
(2) Fund-raising.

VOTE:
Yes - Ivan John Christophe Dustin Jessica Susan Tris
Member - Bruce Cyr, Scott Carr

COMMENTS:
John - I'd be willing to participate in either of those committees.
Susan - I volunteer for Fund-Raising. John, you and I and Tris should e-mail to start working on a solicitation letter. I volunteer to do the part about the disabled groups it can help. Also, new member Mark Ungewitter has volunteered to be on the Finance Committee, and to serve as Treasurer, if wanted. Mark is my partner. He is Investments Manager for Investors Bank and Trust of Boston, and his (bearish) views on money management can usually be found by typing his name into Google. His name might lend some cachet to our money management and fund-raising. He served as Treasurer for the Friends of Ashuelot Park and the Community Kitchen, both in Keene New Hampshire USA. Both projects had major fund-raising campaigns while he was there. If I remember correctly, SAP raised about $9 million and CK raised $1.5 million. He is also a former CPA, and has volunteered to do our ongoing yearly tax filings. (His name is in our incorporation papers as a pro bono contributor.) For purposes of this group, he has no other interests.
I would very much like to actually be of help here, but as yet I'm unsure to a good path (inexperience etc).

Tris: Early efforts may be strongly focused on a PR that will inspire those altruistic folks out there who are deep in hearts and pockets,, who I'm sure are hit upon on and on. But then (ossri) is new potential, since the for-profit disability tech has not really fully reached all the tasks that are needed, hence subsidy here can/will seek/find/reach that which is not happening elsewhere regardless of its open source.



4. Committee and Task Force Reports:

#1 - Sourceforge project (committee) - Scott Carr, Lead Developer
Ed Suominen, Developer
Objections / Amendments / Volunteers?

VOTE:
Yes - Ivan John Christophe Dustin Jessica Susan Tris
Member Yes - Bruce Cyr, Scott Carr

COMMENTS:
John: I am also a sourceforge developer. My user name is jdowding.
Dustin: no objections (yes)
Susan: I forgot to fill this one in. "Confirmation that Windictator have a Sourceforge site sponsored by OSSRI."
Dustin: We currently have a link to the windicator software on the ossri.org website. Do we need to remove this?
Ed: Yeah, let's remove the link until I get the copyright changed (still GPL, don't worry). I'll also provide anoynmous SVN access and developer access on request if someone *does* want to contribute. We can do reciprical links once it's ready for release. In view of the above, I think the Sourceforge issue has gone away. I'll host everything.

NEW BUSINESS:

TRIS: At some point later when the dust may start to settle here, I would like to find out if the effort is worthy to flush out what exactly is doable (or not) for the deaf in terms of instant feed back of their own voice's real world sounds. Their phonemes for pronunciation, possibly also showing; volume, pitch and timbre, can expose errors and accents thus improving our ability to understand them, an obvious goal in connecting to the world and not being isolated in a limiting sign world only. This phonetic asr could overlap, run in parallel or in series to other ASR.
The best hardware (not yet) will be more a long term key to effectiveness and user-friendliness. Even if one used a hand held screen now, if it's the real time voices in their environment with enough accuracy, the phoneme option to ASR could offer the factual phonetic record of utterances sans a vocabulary's missed guesses. Later the best case hardware will be afocal HMDs etc., including contacts, now that the nano world is growing.
One last thing,, (apologies for windedness) it is that exciting silent voice project that NASA has started. When used by the handicapped (asap) if all one need to do is 'think' the speech only to the point of igniting synapses to muscles, not actually exercising them (assuming muscles don't function),, wow! It would great if we can interface to that at what ever point feasible?

Ivan: Phonic transcription should be easy (once you've got orthographic
transcription going). Prosody shouldn't be too hard. This is an
interesting idea for an application.