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08/15/99 to 08/14/00:

 - Workshop:

   Students attending our one-week summer workshop receive 5 
   half-day lectures on theory and implementation details, and
   then spend afternoons in the lab acquiring hands-on skills.
   Students are led through some lab exercises by a senior graduate
   student, and then supervised by lab instructors on more
   open-ended assignments. They work from individual workstations,
   and can see the lab instructor's work on a projection system at
   the front of the class. This format has been very successful for
   training students on our software.

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08/15/98 to 08/14/99:

Students working on this project develop skills
in four major areas:

 - core technology: speech recognition

   In the first year of this project, students have been exposed
   to all major components of a speech recognition system:
   search algorithms, acoustic modeling, training, and lexicon
   development.

 - software engineering: concurrent software development

   Our students are trained to use a state-of-the-art concurrent
   development package (CVS). We make heavier us of this than most,
   and students quickly learn to grapple with the realities of merging
   code from several developers.

   Students are also exposed to a strict procedure for software design
   and development that includes design reviews, code reviews,
   diagnostic testing, memory and format checking, multiple platform
   portability testing, documentation, and release.

 - programming languages: C++, perl, and Tk/Tcl

   Since our primary programming language is C++, students are quickly
   trained to be experts in C++. While we emphasize that code be clean,
   simple, and easy to read, students nevertheless learn about subtle
   issues of the language, including memory management and compiler
   optimization.
   
   Students also perform some of their work in perl and Tk/Tcl.
   Tk/Tcl is particularly useful for developing high performance
   GUI-oriented applications. Perl is used primarily to massage data into
   our standard formats.

 - web programming languages: HTML and Java

   All students must deliver documentation and presentations in html,
   and hence quickly become proficient web programmers. A significant
   portion of our project involves the development of Java applets.
   Our undergraduates, in particular, get a heavy exposure to Java.