Fadi Biadsy (PhD ’11) Develops Tool to Help People with Atypical Speech Patterns

Most people take for granted that when they speak, they will be heard and understood. But for the millions who live with speech impairments caused by physical or neurological conditions, trying to communicate with others can be difficult and lead to frustration. While there have been a great number of recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR; a.k.a. speech-to-text) technologies, these interfaces can be inaccessible for those with speech impairments. Further, applications that rely on speech recognition as input for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) can exhibit word substitution, deletion, and insertion errors. Critically, in today’s technological environment, limited access to speech interfaces, such as digital assistants that depend on directly understanding one’s speech, means being excluded from state-of-the-art tools and experiences, widening the gap between what those with and without speech impairments can access. 

Rising Star Q&A: Natasha Shamis

Natasha Shamis (BC ’06) talks about how her technical background has been key in the evolution of her career path to leading the design for innovative technology-powered products. 

The Data Life Cycle

To put data science in context, we present phases of the data life cycle, from data generation to data interpretation. These phases transform raw bits into value for the end user. Data science is thus much more than data analysis, e.g., using techniques from machine learning and statistics; extracting this value takes a lot of work, before and after data analysis. Moreover, data privacy and data ethics need to be considered at each phase of the life cycle.