Distinguished Career Professor
Carnegie Mellon University
jim@sandboxscribe.com
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James K. Baker Distinguished Career Professor Carnegie Mellon University jim@sandboxscribe.com |
I am interested in all aspects of speech and language technology, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, translation, summarization, information retrieval and search. I have also developed a model for a new form of entrepreneurship and venture capital called "Bootstrap Capital."
To make the needed advances that I believe are possible in speech and language technology, people will need to be trained in the technology and in how to develop applications that use it. To this end, we are trying to establish a Center for Innovations in Speech and Language Technology at Carnegie Mellon's West coast campus in Mountain View, CA. We are developing a curriculum of project-based, learn-by-doing courses in speech and language technology. We are also developing a project-based curriculum in bootstrap entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on start-up or early stage companies developing applications of speech and language technology. The goal is that anyone completing an appropriate selection of technology courses and entrepreneurship courses will have the knowledge and experience needed to create and successfully grow their own company.
In today's world there is an urgent need for better communication, regardless of barriers of language, cultural differences and distance. This pressing need and the ubiquitous nature of speech and language creates an unlimited number of opportunities for useful and interesting research as well as business opportunities for numerous applications. Some of the projects that we are associated with or hope to launch include the following:
A project to collect as many published works as possible, digitize them, and make them available on the Web.
Universal Dictionary
A proposed database with the combined knowledge of all bilingual dictionaries and phrase books.
Million Hour Corpus
A project to collect millions of hours of recorded speech, covering at least 100 languages.
Petabyte Language Knowledge Database
Collect, analyze and annotate a large corpus of text in many languages, the total knowledge base comprising multiple petabytes of data.
The Extreme Speech Recognition System
A next generation speech recognition system based on a new architecture designed to acquire, represent and utilize much more knowledge of speech and language.
100 Languages Project
Create state-of-the-art speech recognition, speech synthesis and translation systems for at least 100 languages.
Immersion World
Create a simulation providing an immersion-like experience for language learning.
Personal Tutor
Using speech and language technology and intelligent artificial agents, create an automated study system comparable to having a private personal tutor.
New Ventures
Create and nurture a number of companies developing successful applications of speech and language technology.
Short History
I was the founder, CEO and Chairman of Dragon Systems, Inc. When Dragon introduced Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the first general purpose automatic dictation system, in 1997, it was the culmination of a 25-year quest. I am now engaged in a second quest, seeking to expand the range and scope of speech and language technology to many more applications and languages. This expansion of scope will also require fundamental breakthroughs in technology and the acquisition and creation of a large collection of language data and knowledge. It will require the collaborative effort of hundreds or thousands of participants, together building a shared world community resource analogous to the mapping of the human genome.