D: Mm - hmm .
E: And we 're on .
E: So , uh C: Time ?
C: Fourteen whatever .
E: So , topic number one is , we got the NSF ATR E: ITR ,
E: excuse me ,
E: which was originally pretty big , but it 's divided among many sites ,
E: and they , like , cut the budget by a th by two thirds .
E: So they they approved it for all the sites ,
E: but only gave us like sixty - two percent of the money .
E: Or , excuse me , cut it by sixty - two percent .
C: Thirty - two .
C: Yeah . Thirty . Whatever .
E: So , uh , Morgan is , uh E: And the other condition is that they have to get a budget out , like , immediately ,
E: or the or they 'll give the money to someone else .
B: By next Friday .
E: So Morgan 's working on that .
E: So , I mean , it 's good news .
E: It 's not as good as it could have been
E: but it was , uh B: It 's more money .
E: The the I T Rs are , you know , a a long shot , and so it 's it 's really nice that we got that .
A: What does that stand for ?
E: Information Technology Research ?
E: Something like that ?
B: Something like that .
D: Hmm .
A: Alright .
E: It 's , uh C: Doesn't say much .
A: Yeah , it 's pretty vague .
B: It 's it 's um , it 's some money that we can use A: It 's government - run , I guess .
B: Uh , I mean , we 're in conjunction with uh , SRI , Washington , and , um , Columbia .
A: Mm - hmm .
A: OK .
B: And to do research on the meetings .
A: Cool .
E: Yeah , it was specifically on the meeting .
C: Not great .
E: So , d was that the one that was the meeting maps ?
B: Yeah .
E: OK , good .
E: I liked that one .
B: Yeah .
C: What is meet meeting maps ?
B: Mapping meetings , or ?
E: Well , the the sort of general idea was , you can think about meetings at lots of different levels ,
E: all the way d from all the way down to acoustics to all the way up to dialogue , discourse , topic .
C: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
E: And so this this was , how do you map all that information onto that ?
E: a onto the meeting domain .
B: It 's like creating a m a map of a meeting , in a sense .
E: So that the the analogy was you have maps of different things at different resolutions .
E: And so , uh ,
C: Uh , OK .
E: So this had a lot of different stuff in it .
C: OK .
B: It actually doesn't have a whole lot of m speech stuff to it .
C: Yeah . Sure .
C: Yeah , that 's E: It 's mostly higher level .
B: It 's C: Yeah .
B: Higher level , yeah .
E: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
E: But , nonetheless , I think if we E: It 's a it 's a cool idea .
E: And if we can actually get it get it going that would be neat .
E: So And uh , this was the one also that was ,
E: uh ,
E: Was it with Susan Ervin - Tripp ?
B: I don't remember .
B: It might have been .
B: Yeah . We had to get some C: With who ?
E: She 's a linguist on campus .
C: OK .
E: Anyway .
E: So , other topics I wanted to talk about are , um , the DARPA demo which , I guess , since Morgan isn't here we can't really talk about .
E: I just wanted to make sure it was ready to go .
A: Yeah .
E: Uh , but I guess A: I sent E: Your stuff is all ready
E: so it 's just a question of , did Morgan get around to testing it .
A: Yeah , and I sent you an email
E: Yeah , I got it . With the instructions .
A: with the instructions .
A: I don't know .
A: So , Morgan A: I guess Morgan 's leaving on Saturday ?
E: Yep .
A: So until then ,
A: I guess we might hear something ,
E: Yeah , so I guess we ge we had better be on call for a little while .
A: but A: Yeah , exactly .
B: Did he ever figure out how to d switch between applications like he was wanting to do ?
E: I don't know .
E: I haven't spoken with him .
A: Yeah .
B: He did ?
A: Oh - Yeah .
C: Switch between applications ?
B: How is he gonna do it ?
E: Alt Tab .
A: It 's just Alt Tab .
A: Like if you hold down Alt and then tap Tab , you just the s just the Task Manager w window comes up .
B: Yeah . Yeah , he C: Yes , that 's E: I I think B: he B: Right .
E: I think the problem was that , I was t saying " hit Alt Tab " with the assumption that he knew what I meant .
C: Yeah .
E: But he didn't .
E: So .
B: No . He said he tried that , but he didn't like it because it ,
A: We
A: Well B: uh B: it took it out of the , um ,
E: But it doesn't .
B: presentation mode .
E: It doesn't .
A: Well , because if you just touch Alt a
A: If you just hit it once ? it 'll go back to the previous application .
A: And the previous application was the PowerPoint demo ,
A: which was the display of like , you know B: Oh !
E: And and all I said was oh just cycle through with Alt Tab
A: Not the slide show .
E: because that 's the standard way of doing it in Windows .
A: Yeah , he didn't E: But of course he doesn't use Windows .
B: Yeah .
A: Right .
E: So ,
E: he didn't know what I meant .
B: Oh , so what do you have to do ?
D: Hmm .
B: You have olt <comment> Alt Tab and E: Hold down at <comment> hold down Alt ,
E: and then tap Tab several times
E: and you 'll cycle through all the open applications .
A: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
B: Ah . <comment> OK . And then it won't B: And then you can come back to your full screen version of your presenta
E: Right .
A: Right .
C: Yeah .
B: Oh !
A: And I told them , um , if he decides to use multiple examples for , um , the prosody demo , to open up separate Transcribers .
A: Just so you don't have to load up files e during the meeting .
E: That 's a good idea .
C: Yeah .
A: So .
C: Yeah .
E: That 's not a bad idea at all ,
E: so that , uh A: He 's got the memory for it .
A: So .
E: Yeah , and since the files are short , it 's just A: Yeah , they 're all really short .
E: I mean the Tcl - TK overhead is pretty high ,
E: but it shouldn't matter .
B: How much memory does he have ?
A: No . I didn't have any problems A: I 'm sorry ?
B: How much memory does he have ?
A: I don't know ,
A: but it seemed it didn't seem to be a problem at all .
A: I would imagine you add sixty - four to a hundred and twenty eight .
B: Hmm .
E: I think he had one twenty - eight ,
A: Yeah , either one will work , I think .
E: eh ,
E: but E: It was faster than my PC .
A: I mean , it was B: Hmm .
E: So .
B: Wow !
A: Yeah , it was fine . I think y
A: Yeah , I mean I I I We kinda walked through it a little bit on his p on his laptop .
B: So , are we the only ones who are giving demo ? Or is , uh , Washington gonna have a demo too ?
A: I could
E: I assume . But they 're all doing Communicator stuff .
B: or ?
B: Oh ! <comment> OK .
E: So .
B: Hmm .
A: And it 's part of the talk itself ,
A: so it 's really not a big part .
B: Yeah , I see .
E: I mean , the talk 's only twenty minutes .
A: It 's just gonna be a couple of E: So . You know , all this time we spent on it 's gonna be thirty seconds of screen time .
A: I know .
B: Oh , my gosh .
A: Right . Uh - huh .
B: Oh .
A: But it 's a good tool to have .
E: Yeah , I
A: The th the m the meeting I R stuff is actually E: Actually , both of them .
E: You know , cuz we 're gonna wanna be playing with the A: Mm - hmm .
E: uh E: help , my brain E: with the uh ,
A: Prosody ?
E: prosody stuff anyway .
E: Um , so , actually , at some point w we should talk to users of that technology who are actually gonna be using it
E: and see what they would like to see .
A: Yeah , have you guys seen the display ?
A: Have you guys seen either of the demos ?
A: They 're pretty cool ,
B: No .
C: Nope .
A: like the prosody demo , we basically w loaded up um , word alignments .
A: So , instead of having um , utterances in the bottom , it 's like just word by word .
B: Mm - hmm .
A: So you can see exactly where the overlaps are .
B: Oh .
A: And then , um , Adam did something where , um , we converted these feature files into wave files ,
A: so you can display them .
B: Display the features .
C: Instead of the wave file ?
A: Yeah . Instead of the wave file .
C: Oh . OK .
A: And then w using multi - wave you can add a file and play that sound .
B: Mm - hmm .
A: Play the audio corresponding to that , um , um , feature file ,
C: OK .
A: and it 's all like , aligned and stuff .
C: Ah , great .
B: So you see , like , the F - zero contour ?
A: Yeah , so you see the pitch contours
A: and you and when you hit play , like there 's a line that goes through it ,
A: you know , and it 's all aligned with like the t the audio and the feature file .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: Oh , that 's great .
E: Audio .
C: Yeah .
E: And the stylized F - naught features are pretty cool .
B: Hmm .
A: Yeah .
E: So , these this it 's - does a piece - wise linear
E: and so , normally if you look at an F - naught track , it jumps all over the place .
B: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
E: This is a nice smooth one
B: Oh , neat .
E: and it really does a good job .
C: And there 's something like a median filter in it ? or something ?
C: And uh , and it 's it 's a linear fit or whatever .
A: Yeah , there 's a E: It 's a combination .
A: Yeah .
A: There 's a median filtering and then there 's a piece - wise linear fit , based on some criteria .
C: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
A: I 'm not sure .
C: OK .
E: Uh , t
E: G Actually could you email me a reference to that paper ? If you have it ?
A: Yeah , sure .
E: Cuz I 'm sorta curious how what criteria it has .
A: I should email Morgan about it too ,
A: because he was asking about that .
A: And Yeah .
E: I mean , so , there 's obviously a trade - off between the number of knots y you pick , and the best fit .
E: I mean , so , if you 're doing a piece - wise linear , you have to figure out how many pieces you want .
C: Yeah .
C: Yeah . Sure .
E: And so there 's a trade - off
E: because the best the best mean squared fit would be with an infinite number of knots .
A: Right , well , then it 's not a linear f fit .
C: Yeah .
C: Yeah . Yeah .
A: You 're not fitting anything then .
E: Well , sure it is .
E: But
A: Well C: Yeah .
E: So so you There 's a trade - off
A: Yeah . It A: It 's kind of a useless one .
E: and I 'm wondering what criteria they use .
A: Yeah , I actually don't know off the top of my head .
E: Mm - hmm .
B: Was this code that you downloaded to do this ?
B: Or was it A: This was um , Kemal Sonmez at SRI ,
A: who 's a co - worker with , uh , Liz .
B: Hmm .
E: Dot com .
B: At SRI dot com ?
A: Yeah . Did I just E: No , I you said " at SRI "
B: No , i
E: so I had <comment> to add the " dot com " .
B: It sounded like a URL , the way you were saying it ,
A: Oh . Oh .
B: yeah .
A: Sorry .
A: Um , yeah , but , so Kamal has , uh A: He did a paper on this for some v speech verification , uh , project ,
A: and we basically e extrapolated what he what he did for that work and applied it to our files .
A: And that 's how we do That 's how we get our feature files and everything for all the prosody .
B: So what I mean is , like the implementation that you used was something that you coded up here ?
B: Or you grabbed code from somewhere else ?
A: That A: No , we grabbed most of it .
A: Like , we grabbed the linear fitting stuff .
B: Ah .
B: I see .
A: We did all the alignments
A: and all the matching and stuff ,
B: Mm - hmm .
C: And A: but the actual coding of the C: And the
A: the math was done somewhere else .
C: These are our F - zero candidates which I 'm supposed to use for the synthesis thing ?
C: I suppose ?
A: Uh , so that 's what you were working on ,
A: right ?
D: Right . That 's the same software I used to get the data .
C: Yeah . OK .
C: OK .
D: I I gave you a c couple examples ,
C: Yeah , I m didn't have time to to look at that ,
D: and E: Hmm .
C: so .
D: Right . Right .
C: Yeah .
E: So , other topic is , uh , the IBM <comment> transcription status stuff .
E: So we 've sent a few to them .
E: We 've gotten a few back .
E: Um ,
E: I sorta wish Jane was were here
E: because I think she gave E: Didn't she give one of them to one of the transcribers ?
B: Yeah , it 's done now .
E: And , how was it ?
B: She said it was much faster .
E: Great .
B: It really helped a lot to have that .
B: So , um , you know , there were a l
C: Much faster than doing everything alone .
E: Hand .
B: From scratch .
C: OK .
B: Yeah . So A: From end to en Like , from the beginning of the process to the end of the process ?
B: No , f no . So from the point where we s take it , it 's faster .
E: Well , but that 's what we wanted .
C: Yeah .
E: Right .
E: We knew it would be longer to have multiple groups .
A: Ooo . Yeah .
B: u So it 's sorta like doing things in parallel .
A: Yeah , right .
E: Right .
B: You know ? So if , you know , if they can be working on that while we 're working on the other things , then when we get them in , they don't have to do that one from scratch , basically .
E: Well , pipelined .
A: Mm - hmm .
A: Right .
E: The idea is that we 're taking less time of the linguists .
A: Right .
E: Of the transcribers .
E: So .
A: S
B: Yeah , th Right now it is taking a bit of time to turn around the meetings from IBM ,
B: part
B: There 's there 's several problems .
B: One is , um , we were giving them these large files ,
C: Fff !
B: which they then had to split up and put onto cassette tapes .
B: So either ninety minute or sixty minute tapes ,
A: Oh .
B: so they had to try to find an appropriate place to break this large file that we gave them .
B: So one of the things that we did is , Adam made a modification to th his script that generates this so you can tell it that you want , uh , basically , uh , chunks that are no more than either thirty or forty - five minutes .
A: Mm - hmm .
B: And then we can give those to IBM
B: and it 'll make it easier for them to put them on tape .
B: Um , then the other thing is that these pool of transcribers that they 're using , um , sort of are not dedicated to to our project ,
B: but are in use for all IBM projects ,
B: and IBM has recently giving given them uh , a whole bunch of stuff .
B: So it 's gonna , sort of delay us .
E: We might wanna revisit hiring our own external transcription company .
E: Because I think that would be cheaper than having our people do it ,
E: but do it with the same process with these beep files .
B: Hmm , that 's an interesting idea .
E: I mean , cuz , originally I had disc discounted that
E: because it was just gonna be too hard .
E: But now we have this procedure with the beep files worked out .
B: Yeah . So the only difference would be , we would be putting the stuff on tape versus IBM .
E: Then maybe it would be OK .
C: Yeah .
E: Yep .
B: And then we could send If if we had that process down , of putting the audio onto tape ,
B: we can send IBM the tapes or we can send this transcription place the tape
E: And we might wanna do that anyway .
E: Because it seems like that 's being a bottleneck and that 's silly .
E: It shouldn't be a bottleneck .
B: Yeah .
E: I mean It would Once we got it set up it w it B: Well , u u
B: So , I don't know where the bottleneck was .
B: Was the bottleneck in breaking this large file up into the appropriate size chunks ? or was it actually putting it onto the tape ?
E: It may well have been partially that , you know ,
E: because they tried it ,
E: and then they would have to listen to the tape and find out where it bleeps ,
B: Exactly .
E: and go forward in the file , et cetera , et cetera .
B: Yeah .
E: But , uh ,
B: Yeah .
E: it just seems like  it 's not hard for us to do ,
E: and that would just make things go faster .
B: Yeah , so how do we do that ?
B: How would we put E: Get a tape deck ,
C: Yeah .
B: Yeah .
E: plug it in to the computer ,
C: Plug it into the sound card .
E: hit record ,
E: on the tape deck ,
C: Yeah .
E: and just do it all all uh , analog .
B: So plug i So , like , the headphone output in the back of the computer ?
E: Well , line out .
C: Line out , yeah .
B: Line - out into the line - in on a tape player ,
E: Mm - hmm .
A: Hmm .
C: Yep .
B: and B: Oh ! Well , that sounds pretty easy .
E: So I mean , that 's the easy way .
E: They might have a more complex set - up at IBM .
E: I 've seen digital digital analog tapes where it 's controlled by the computer .
C: Yeah , but The easy way is B: Mmm .
E: But w But we don't need to do that .
C: Yeah . I know .
C: No .
C: Yeah .
E: The the disadvantage of doing it this way is it 's real time .
E: So you would have to sit there for an hour while it 's recording .
B: Yeah . But if it was at your desk or something E: But C: Yeah , but you C: Yeah . Pfff . <comment> Yeah .
E: Right . It 's not a big deal .
A: So , what 's the turn around period right now from IBM ?
B: Well , they There was A: Should we be discussing this ,
B: OK .
B: So th They , um , they gave They 've given us B: Since we started doing this new , uh , beep format with " beep number beep " ,
A: Mm - hmm .
B: they 've given us , uh , I think , two full , uh , transcripts .
B: They have a third one
B: and Brian just sent me a note saying " oh , that third one somehow slipped through the cracks of their tr of the eh transcriptionists ' , uh , s company " .
A: Mmm .
B: And so there 's gonna be delay of a week before we get that third one back .
B: And I 've already given him three more to work on ,
A: OK .
B: but he said those new three won't get done until this big chunk of data has been processed by the company .
A: OK .