Troubadours of the Disaster

Following the death of his father, San Francisco-based music critic Manuel “Manny” Soares is sent by his editor to Amsterdam to find the next big thing in music. Manny hopes that the physical distance from his home will help him work through his father’s passing. Manny finds himself on a late-night flight to Schipol Airport. On a layover in Frankfurt, Manny manages to cause a small riot in the airport bar and escapes. Once he makes “groundfall” in Amsterdam as his editor, Ian, puts it, Manny is on the hunt. Globalization mixed with culture shock follow him as he navigates his way through the Dutch music scene. He cannot escape the feelings of loss, which evoke memories of his survival after the long-expected earthquake in the Bay Area (colloquially known as “The Big Shake”). Manny’s chance meeting with an attractive Dutch illustrator, Femke, who is a fan of an unknown Dutch band called “Some People I Know” move the plot forward to the climax. Along the way, Manny encounters a photographer with controversial artwork and a Dutch film professor who wants to erase his own image. Following the death of a vaunted Dutch astronaut, the novella’s climax sees Manny joining a crowd of Dutch mourners. Individually and collectively, they release hundreds of paper fire lanterns into the night sky in the final cathartic scene. Simultaneously, “Some People I Know” (who are with the mourners) begin to play their music of loss and longing prompting Manny to realize that he has found the next big thing music

“Pyrographic calligraphy”

This series of work explores a new process for calligraphy practices called Pyrographic technique in which hot molten glass are gathered and used as a drawing medium to created burnt marks on paper. Traditional hand written calligraphy is then applied to the work, responding to the aesthetics of the burnt marks and the contexts of the words being written

‘SCIENCE’ (Design4Science exhibition)

This large piece of work was created for the ‘Design4Science’ exhibition curated by Shirley Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. The artwork integrates digital media and calligraphic processes to visually interpret aspects of science. The research led to the use a calligraphic font ‘Impetuous’ that was designed by Ling. The text used was taken from Fred Sanger, the twice recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The work addresses the question of how to visually interpret science with calligraphy? Ling’s outcome was to draw a parallel between geometric calligraphic forms and that of viral structures

Contract bridge as a micro-world for reasoning about communication agents

We argue that bidding in the game of Contract Bridge can profitably be regarded as a micro-world suitable for experimenting with pragmatics. We sketch an analysis in which a "bidding system" is treated as the semantics of an artificial language, and show how this "language", despite its apparent simplicity, is capable of supporting a wide variety of common speech acts parallel to those in natural languages; we also argue that the reason for the relatively unsuccessful nature of previous attempts to write strong Bridge playing programs has been their failure to address the need to reason explicitly about knowledge, pragmatics, probabilities and plans. We give an overview of Pragma, a system currently under development at SICS, which embodies these ideas in concrete form, using a combination of rule-based inference, stochastic simulation, and "neural-net" learning. Examples are given illustrating the functionality of the system in its current form

Hybrid language processing in the Spoken Language Translator

The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rules are desirable in order to encode domain-independent linguistic constraints and achieve high-quality grammatical output, while corpus-derived statistics are needed if systems are to be efficient and robust; further, that hybrid architectures are superior from the point of view of portability to architectures which only make use of one type of information. We address the topics of ``multi-engine'' strategies for robust translation; robust bottom-up parsing using pruning and grammar specialization; rational development of linguistic rule-sets using balanced domain corpora; and efficient supervised training by interactive disambiguation. All work described is fully implemented in the current version of the SLT-2 system.Comment: 4 pages, uses icassp97.sty; to appear in ICASSP-97; see http://www.cam.sri.com for related materia

The Speech-Language Interface in the Spoken Language Translator

The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to spoken Swedish and to French. It is constructed, with as few modifications as possible, from existing pieces of speech and language processing software. The speech recognizer and language understander are connected by a fairly conventional pipelined N-best interface. This paper focuses on the ways in which the language processor makes intelligent use of the sentence hypotheses delivered by the recognizer. These ways include (1) producing modified hypotheses to reflect the possible presence of repairs in the uttered word sequence; (2) fast parsing with a version of the grammar automatically specialized to the more frequent constructions in the training corpus; and (3) allowing syntactic and semantic factors to interact with acoustic ones in the choice of a meaning structure for translation, so that the acoustically preferred hypothesis is not always selected even if it is within linguistic coverage.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX. Published: Proceedings of TWLT-8, December 199

Two Mechanical Engineering Students Named Inaugural Hino Motors Scholars

David Biggs and Manny Dhaliwal benefit from financial and professional suppor