JSALT: A Day in the Life

Six weeks is a very short period for a ~25 person team to come together, reconcile goals and expectations, and produce results. Consequently, we are constantly on our toes, changing directions of research and taking risks as needed. Every day is different, and our week-to-week schedule is irregular, too. Despite this, I’ve fallen into somewhat of a routine here at JSALT.

The Speaker Diarization in Adverse Scenarios team

Daily Schedule

In general, my days look a little something like this…

8am: I wake up, have some breakfast and listen to music at my apartment.
I check whatever process I have running in the morning because it’s likely to have failed the night before.
Around 8:45 I take the ‘scenic route’ from my apartment to the ETS building for work. In reality, it takes about four minutes to walk from door to door. I take about 15 minutes, sometimes making circles around buildings just to spend some more time in the warm sunshine and fresh air before I’m holed up in the lab all day.

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JSALT: Summer School and Getting Oriented

Every year, Johns Hopkins University holds the Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop (about page here). This human language technologies (HLT) workshop has taken place almost every year since the mid-90s. This year, 2019, is the sixth year that it’s held in honor of  Frederick Jelinek.  It’s abbreviated JSALT – which, I have to say, doesn’t make much sense to me. Jelinek Summer Annual (workshop) on Language Technologies is the best I can come up with to reconcile the full name and the abbreviation.

This year, it is held in Montreal. I couldn’t imagine a better place to spend the summer. It’s usually at a university in the U.S., but this year it’s held at École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS). One of the organizers did his Ph.D. at ETS and took advantage of his contacts there to make JSALT happen in Montreal. Last December, the Hopkins organizers accepted proposals from professors all over the world who had an idea for a research direction during the workshop. The five following projects were selected:

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