Thursday, March 31, 2011

CMU's Avenue Project

Before there was HLTDI, there was Carnegie Mellon's Avenue Project, which seems to have had basically the same goal as us -- produce good machine translation systems for under-resourced languages, especially those spoken by under-resourced indigenous people.

Avenue itself doesn't seem to have been under-resourced, though -- they sent people to South America (Chile, Peru, Bolivia...) to collect training data, and seemed to have a lot of contacts with local educators and language experts. They got quite a few papers out of this line of research, and apparently wrote a lot of good software. They had a much deeper pool of money (and arguably talent) than we do.

And now... the website is dormant, the PhD students involved seem to have graduated, the data and software are not publicly available, and the researchers seem to have moved on to other things. (one of the resulting doctors is the illimitable Kathrin Probst, who hipped me to Avenue when we were both at Google Atlanta, although I didn't really grasp how serious it was at the time -- darn her for being so humble!)

They were pretty gracious in giving us the Quechua data that they collected (and said we could redistribute it), and I've been reading a bunch of their papers, but I'm left some sadness about the whole enterprise -- they surely already went through a lot of the problems that HLTDI is going to have to address. Why can't we just check out and fork their code?

... maybe I should ask for their software too. Science is supposed to be easily replicable, isn't it?

Thursday, March 24, 2011

did you know: F-Spot can export to picasa, flickr, etc!

If you're using Picasa Web Albums, and you're on Linux (maybe a small audience for this post), you don't have to manually upload your files on the web interface or use the Picasa client. The Picasa client is OK, I guess, but it's actually a thinly veiled Windows app bundled with a version of Wine. It's not all that snappy, and it doesn't feel like the rest of the apps on the Linux desktop, and it's not open source.

But! F-Spot is native, and well-integrated with Gnome, and Free Software... and it can very easily upload your photos to picasaweb, or other online photo-hosting places. That's pretty rad.