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SUMMARY:Speech &amp\; NLP at Amazon — Unique Challenges\, Unique Resourc
 es - Jeff Adams (Amazon)
DTSTART:20131028T100000Z
DTEND:20131028T110000Z
UID:TALK48475@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Rogier van Dalen
DESCRIPTION:(Not a research talk.)\n\nAmazon's new speech & language group
  has an interesting set of tasks to work on.  From aligning e-books and au
 diobooks\, to indexing home-made video reviews of consumer products\, and 
 a dozen other applications in between\, there is a lot to do for the indus
 try's newest research lab. Fortunately\, the lab has access to a wealth of
  resources\, from Amazon's vast media holdings\, to Amazon Mechanical Turk
  for annotation\, to Amazon's Web Service infrastructure\, the environment
  has been compared to being a startup with infinite resources.  In this pr
 esentation\, I will summarize some of the tasks we are taking on\, and som
 e prospects for the future.  I will also address opportunities for interns
 hips and employment with this new group\, including some tips on what to e
 xpect when interviewing.\n\n*Bio*\n\nJeff Adams has 18 years of experience
  in speech research management at a variety of firms.  Under Jeff's leader
 ship\, speech scientists at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence\, Lernout and Ha
 uspie\, Dragon\, ScanSoft\, Nuance\, and Yap achieved unprecedented breakt
 hroughs in accuracy with leading-edge\ncommercial large-vocabulary speech 
 recognition products such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking\, L&H VoiceXpress\, 
 Kurzweil Voice\, Dictaphone EXSpeech & PowerScribe\, and Yap's state of th
 e art voicemail ASR service. Jeff continues that tradition at Amazon\, whe
 re he is leading efforts to build a new speech & language lab.\n \nJeff st
 udied mathematics at Brigham Young University (B.S.\, summa cum laude\, 19
 84)\, the University of California (M.A.\, 1989)\, and the University of O
 regon. He worked as a mathematician for the Department of Defense for seve
 ral years before applying his skills to speech recognition
LOCATION:Department of Engineering - LR3B
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