Internet-Accessible Speech Recognition Technology by, Joseph Picone, Richard Duncan, and Jon Hamaker Institute for Signal and Information Processing Mississippi State University http://www.isip.msstate.edu/projects/speech Since the late 1980's, we have promoted a vision of free software for speech and signal processing research following in the footsteps of other successful projects, such as the Free Software Foundation. Our goal has been to develop a comprehensive software environment for performing data intensive science and engineering research that is flexible yet computationally efficient. Our premier application is large vocabulary speech recognition though our software is designed to be much more general than this specific application. Our approach to creating such a lasting infrastructure incorporates a diversity of technologies, including some novel Internet-based Java applets that let users interact with the technology without the need to install the software locally. We also host an extensive signal processing web site that includes on-line courses, tutorials, and toolkits. Support, training, and education are important ingredients to our success. The goal in this presentation is two-fold. First, we review the challenges associated with developing such a large-scale application. Second, we discuss the limitations of current programming paradigms. Though software tools and concepts have advanced significantly in the past decade, there are still some very fundamental obstacles that preclude the development of simple, easy-to-use, and extensible software tools for engineers. To be presented at: O'Reilly Open Source Convention Special Session: Open Source Speech Sheraton Harbor Island, San Diego, CA, USA July 23-27, 2001 http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon2001/ Biographies: JOSEPH PICONE received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1983. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University, where he also directs the Institute for Signal and Information Processing. He has previously been employed by Texas Instruments and AT&T Bell Laboratories. His primary research interest currently is the development of public domain speech recognition technology. Dr. Picone is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a registered Professional Engineer. RICHARD DUNCAN is pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science at Mississippi State University with emphasis in software engineering. He has held summer internships at Microsoft, AT&T Labs Research and NIST. His current research interests involve applying software engineering process to the development of a public domain speech recognition system at the Institute for Signal and Information Processing (ISIP) at MSU. JONATHAN HAMAKER is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Mississippi State University in 1997 and 1999 respectively. He is also a senior member of the Institute for Signal and Information Processing whose goal is to develop state-of-the-art public-domain speech recognition software. His current research revolves around developing robust pattern classifiers which can be used to improve the accuracy and resilience of speech recognition systems. He is a former Barrier Fellow at Mississippi State University and has twice held internships in the Intelligent Interfaces Technology Group at Microsoft Corp, Redmond, Washington. Here, he worked on improving the noise-robustness of their speech system as well helping with the production of the speech engine in SAPI 5.0.