Curriculum

The ICISLT project will require that a large number of people be trained in the current and future methodologies of speech and language.  The project will require expertise from many different fields, native speakers of many languages.  It will require skill in conducting leading edge research and and the experience and talent to design and build state-of-the-art applications.  This will require a curriculum of a dozens of courses to be made available to students in many countries.  Development of this curriculum is a core part of the ICISLT project.  Curriculum and courseware development will be organized under the principals of Extreme Bootstrap Development.  The courses will generally be based on project oriented, hands-on learn-by-doing instruction.

The versions of the courses offered through this website are intended for distance learning by any student who is prepared and able to make the commitment to be a fully contributing member of any project teams.  The student does not need to be enrolled in any of the universities associated with the ICISLT project.  The courses and projects will not be tied to the academic calendar.  All courses are intended for students who are interested in acquiring knowledge for its own sake.  As such they may be taken not for credit and without an affiliation with Carnegie Mellon or any other university. Affiliated universities or individual faculty members may offer similar for-credit courses.  Enrollment in such courses should be done directly with the particular institution offering the desired course.  Although the courses may be taken as non-credit, each course and project will be graded based on the success of the project and the individual contribution of each student as judged by fellow students, teaching assistants and faculty.  Rigorous grading standards will be maintained to provide a record of a student's ability to complete advanced work that may be presented to educational institutions and employers.

Current Concentration Areas and Courses under Development:

(Note: The courses are being developed by a bootstrap process.  The initial course will be Fundamentals of Speech Recognition.  Other courses will be developed spreading out from this foundation.  You can help a new course be offered by recruiting students and mentors.)

• Speech Recognition
  • Fundamentals of Speech Recognition
  • Signal Processing for Speech Recognition
  • Design and Implementation of Speech Recognition Systems
  • Extreme Speech™ Recognition Research
  • Speech Recognition for Faculty and Mentors

   

• Speech Synthesis
  • Fundamentals of Speech Synthesis
  • Do-it-yourself Voice Building
  • Do-it-yourself Speech Synthesis
  • Extreme Speech™ Synthesis Research
  • Topics in Speech Synthesis
  • Testing Speech Synthesis Systems
  • Speech Synthesis for Faculty and Mentors

   

• Applications Development
  • Fundamentals of Application Development with Speech and Language Technology
  • Personal Secretary Service
  • Meeting Facilitator
  • Call Center Productivity Tools
  • Developing Games with Speech and Language Technology

   

• Information Retrieval
  • Natural Language Query Systems
  • Summarization
  • Natural Language Data Mining
  • Audio Data Mining
  • Diarization

   

• Translation
  • Interactive Bi-Lingual Communication System
  • Training to be a Translator/Interpreter
  • Translation Research
  • Speech-to-Speech Translation
  • Translation for Faculty and Mentors

   

• Language Instruction
  • Tools for Language Instruction
  • Development of Tools to Teach English as a Foreign Language
  • Virtual Immersion

   

• Software Engineering
  • Extreme Programming in a Research Project
  • Eat Your Own Cooking

   

• Business Concentration
  • Creating a Business in Speech and Language Technology
  • Extreme Bootstrapping
  • Extreme Entrepreneurship -- Beyond Venture Capital
  • Extreme Venture Capital or Bootstrap Capital
  • Extreme IPO
  • Managing Growth and Profitability
  • Simulated Business World