================================================================
08/15/99 to 08/14/00:

Our contributions in the second year of this project primarily
impact the fields of speech recognition, human language
technology, and digital signal processing. Our major
accomplishments are as follows:

 - Production System Release:
    -> first release of the production speech recognition 
       based on our modular libraries is scheduled for July 1.

 - Hosted two workshops:
    -> a software design review held in January 2000 that
       included a one-day training session
    -> a one-week training workshop to be held in May 2000
       that will include 25 participants representing 6 
       countries, 17 universities, one government agency and
       one company. Twenty of the participants are graduate
       students.

 - Software engineering:
    -> added an automated report tracking system to our on-line
       support
    -> upgraded our distribution to use the autoconf facility:
       a standard way of distribution Unix software in which
       the distribution automatically configures itself.
    -> enhanced our ability to do multi-platform testing (we
       now benchmark our releases on Sun Sparc, Sun Solaris x86,
       Linux, and Windows before making a release), and bug
       detection (we make extensive use of professional
       strength debugging tools).

 - Foundation classes:
    -> refined the existing core mathematics classes
    -> added data structures, algorithms, and other signal
       processing building blocks.
    -> introduced classes to handle acoustic models, search
       algorithms, and knowledge sources.
    -> released a production front-end that allows arbitrary
       algorithms to be implemented using a graphical user
       interface

 - Java Applets:
    -> enhanced our pattern recognition applet with several
       important new features, including generation of
       arbitrary data sets, clustering, and visualization of
       decision surfaces.

 - On-Line Support:
    -> we are averaging approximately 5 serious support
       requests per day, and support a user group that has
       grown to over 170 participants. Support is definitely
       becoming a time-consuming issue.

================================================================
08/15/98 to 08/14/99:

Our contributions in the first year of this project primarily
impact the fields of speech recognition, human language
technology, and digital signal processing. Our major
accomplishments are as follows:

 - Development of ISIP's Foundation Classes (IFCs)
 - Creation of a Comprehensive Web Site
 - Java Applets
 - Remote Job Submission Facility
 - Human Resources and Outreach

These are described in detail in various sections below.

 - Development of ISIP's Foundation Classes (IFCs)

   The foundation classes include general mathematics
   (scalars, vectors, matrices), data structures (linked
   lists, binary trees) and other useful abstractions
   (command line parsing, database management).  We have
   completed implementation of the math classes.

   The abstractions we use for these build upon ideas
   promoted in the ANSI C++ standard template library, but
   also add important features required for speech
   recognition research and technology development, such as
   explicit control of the data size of an integral type.

   Several interesting software engineering practices were
   implemented, including internal diagnostics that
   automatically test a class. For example, by simply typing
   'make diagnose', a test program is generated for a class,
   which can be run, debugged, checked for memory leaks,
   etc. This is proving to be an invaluable tool for
   guaranteeing the quality of the code.

 - Creation of a Comprehensive Web Site

   The entire project can be viewed from a web site created
   to support this project. The URL is:

    http://www.isip.msstate.edu/projects/speech

   This site includes a place to download software,
   educational information such as tutorials, applets,
   technical reports, application toolkits, some Java applets
   demonstrating core concepts, and a remote job submission
   facility described below.

   We have implemented a facility to manage and distribute
   our software using a package called Concurrent Versions
   System (CVS). This allows users to download our production
   code via an anonymous CVS server (similar to ftp) that
   automatically updates their code as revisions are made.
   CVS is generally considered to be state-of-the-art in
   software management.

   We have also implemented web pages that maintain an
   archive of our mailing lists used for the project. These
   archives are located at

    http://www.isip.msstate.edu/data/mailing_lists

   and are automatically updated daily.