"A Voice-Enabled Procedure Navigator for the Internation Space Station"

1/14/05: 10:30 AM
11th Floor Large Conference Room
Host: Patrick Pantel, schedule

Abstract: Onboard the International Space Station, astronauts execute thousands of complex procedures to maintain life support systems, check out space suits, conduct science experiments and perform medical exams, among their many tasks. Today, when carrying out these procedures, an astronaut reads from paper procedures, or a PDF viewver on a laptop computer, which requires the astronaut to shirt attention from the task to scroll PDF pages. The goal of the Clarissa project has been to develop an experimental voice-operated procedure reader, enabling astronauts to be more efficient with their hands and eyes and give full attention to the task. the prototype version was delivered by a Russian Progress rocket on Christmas Day, 2004; tests are scheduled to start late in January. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the fist non-trivial spoken dialogue system ever to be used in space. We will demo the Clarissa prototype and describe some of the techniques we have used to construct it, focussing in particular on the following aspects: - Converting text procedures into voice-navigable XML documents. - Flexible grammar-based speech recognition with teh Open Source Regulus toolkit. -Support Vector Machine methods for "open mic" speech recognition. -Side-effect free dialogue management. (Joint work with Beth Ann Hockey, Kim Farrell, Nikos Chatzichrisafis, Jean-Michel Renders, John Dowding and Jim Hieronymus)

About Manny Rayner: Manny Rayner received a B.A. in Mathematics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Stockholm. From 1991 until 1999, he worked at SRI International's Cambridge Computer Science Research Center, where he was PI on Spoken Language Translator, one of the world's first speech translation projects. Since leaving SRI, his work has centered on the development of Regulus, an Open Source platform that supports compilation of speech recognisers from unification grammars. he is currently working on Regulus-based projects at NASA Ames Research Center, California and Geneva University, Switzerland.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006