Page 49 - Summer 2010

ASA award winners David Liu (l) and Marian Bechtel (c) with Dr. Nick Maltsev, ASA judge.
for Web browsers and cell phones. This package is not 100% perfect, since algorithms are based on phenomenological data, or on particular speech utterances (complete units of speech). David developed and coded an addition to this package, which trains algorithm on the set of the utterances, recognized with high confidence. He improved the error ratio on 13.8% of 32,000 automatically created utterances. There is also a non- acoustic related part of the project, which reveals David’s pro- grammer skills. The work is exceptionally good.
ASA also awarded two Honorable Mention prizes, both in the category of Physics and Astronomy. This year one award went to 15-year old Alexander Matthew Atkinson from Oakton High School, Vienna, VA for experiments with a sonic sled. Another Honorable Mention prize went to 17-year old Ellen Marie Price from Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School in Birmingham, AL for comparison of
averaged and individual perimeters of human voices..
The judging team included Dr. Robert Showen, founder and chief scientist of ShotSpotter Inc., Dr. Jay Shopping and
Dr. Sci. Nick Maltsev, who presented the awards.
The team was pleased that the awards went to a nice mix of young men and women, and that they included representa- tives of the physics, engineering, computer science, and med- ical disciplines of ASA interest. We were uniformly impressed by the growing technical education and skills of today’s high- school students, and feel—based on the entire assembly of exhibits—that our scientific and engineering future is falling into increasingly capable hands. We found the fair to be tech- nically exhilarating and would recommend that any ASA member asked to judge next year’s fair accept the invitation
with enthusiasm.
Nick Maltsev, Dr. Sci.
48 Acoustics Today, July 2010