IPTSE, Winter School 2009

During the final presentation

Another one, during the same time

During a pizza party by the CMU prof. on the last day

The Speech Track students with the CMU prof. in the centre.

I had a wonderful opportunity to be a part of Internship Program in Technology Supported Education(IPTSE), Winter School 2009, a partnership between IIIT Hyderabad and CMU.

Winter School 2009 had three tracks: Speech, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning(CSCL) and Educational Games and was held from 10th to 22nd December 2009 at IIIT-H.

I and Akhil were in Speech track, which turned out to be the best one amongst all three. In the first three days, we had lectures and panel discussions about Research, life of a researcher, education system in India and similar stuff. We were given basic presentations about projects in each track.

Then we had to choose our own group projects and had to complete them in the next 8 days. On the last two days, we presented our work and gave demos.

Overall it was a great experience. We learned a lot. The CMU profs were awesome. I worked under Dr. Bhiksha Raj. He always had a solution to all kind of wierd problems we had. His knowledge of the field is awesome. He has in-depth knowledge about everything, is an expert in Maths, Algorithms and probably every field even minutely related to Speech.

Our work was related to extracting Prosody (pitch, intensity, duration) features from an input speech and superimpose them on an output speech of a speech to speech translator. Our presentation might be uploaded on the CMU site as well!!!

IIIT-Hyderabad is also great. There is a wonderful research environment here. I can come or leave the lab whenever I want. All labs are open 24-hours. Even the guards have computers (though a bit old) with net access. They are almost always found watching telugu movies, especially in the night.

On the last day, we went to Dominoes with our prof for a pizza party. It was probably the first time, I went out to eat with a prof. Really, all CMU profs were really helpfull. They all seemed really excited and energetic about the work they were doing.

Some of the memories I have of winter school will probably stay with me throughout my life!!