Paul Lamere has been writing software for the last twenty years. He
spent much of that time developing real-time, embedded systems. His
software can be found embedded in medical instrumentation,
manufacturing equipment and even the U2 spy plane (although he can't
talk about that too much)). Paul switched over to developing in the
Java Programming Language (tm) about five years ago and he hasn't
looked back since. Paul joined the Speech Technology group at Sun
Labs in the summer of 2000. His current software interests are
developing speech applications and Extreme Programming. His goal
for the next few months is to beat Will and Philip in Ping Pong.
Philip joined the Speech Group in the summer of 2000. He graduated
with a degree in Computer Science from Hampshire College in May 2000. He
was previously employed as research intern at DIMACS Research Center, where he
carried out large-scale networks simulation research. There, he built
the first JAVA version of the SSF
Net, and implemented the OSPF routing protocol on top of it. His
thesis was to build a network visualization system for the SSF Network
in JAVA. He also interned at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center,
where he was working on a software library system for internal use.
Since joining Sun, he has been building speech applications out of
existing packages. He hopes to integrate his interests into areas like
networking as well.
Philip is originally from Hong Kong, which, IHHO, is the greatest
city in the world. He certainly retains his hometown interests of
mahjong, karaoke, canto-pop, window-shopping, tennis and ping-pong.
Email: philip.kwok@east.sun.com
Nicole Yankelovich: Collaborator
Nicole is now the Principal Investigator for the
Network Communities Group
in Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Prior to forming that group,
Nicole was the Principal Investigator of the Speech Applications Group
from 1993-1998 after founding the group. Nicole maintains a collaboration
role with the Speech Integration Group.
Nicole specializes in designing speech user interfaces. She has
designed a suite of conversational applications within the
SpeechActs Framework,
and more recently, several Java-based applications based on
the Java Speech API (Java Speech Mail, Hands-free Instruction Manual,
Java Speech Utilities). She has developed techniques for conducting
natural dialog studies to inform the design of the speech interface.
Prior to joining Sun in 1991, Nicole worked as Project Coordinator at
the Brown University Institute for Research in Information and
Scholarship (IRIS). During her 9 years at IRIS, she focused on user
interface design in the context of an integrated, multi-user hypertext
system. Nicole has published a variety of papers on speech
applications, user interface design, and hypertext, and she has served
on the organizing and program committees of conferences such as CHI,
UIST, ASSETS, Hypertext, and CSCW.
Email: Nicole.Yankelovich@sun.com
Willie Walker: Principal Investigator
Paul Lamere: Staff Engineer
Philip Kwok: Member of Technical Staff