Arthur Chan's Personal Web Page

This is a page I started at 2005 to put all materials which do not necessarily represent the view of CMU.

So, let me put it very clearly, all webpages which has dark background are pages which are my opinion only but they do not represent the standpoints of Carnegie Mellon Unversity or CMU Sphinx Group . Everyone has his/her own opinion. That's partially why I wrote this page.

I wrote these stuffs mainly when I procrastinated. After years being an engineer, I found that procrastination is quite important when you write too much for computers (such as computer programs), for academia (such as academic papers) and for your managers (such as reports). Some consider all three types of writing are not for normal human being. After being a programmer for a while, I found that the first type is indeed not human-readable. For the latter two types, I am still not old enough to judge whether that is true.

When I was 20 and I was still an undergraduate, I was shopping for an interesting topic for my final year project in electrical engineering. I chose to work on speech recognition. In a nutshell, it is supposed to be a technology that allows computer to understand what human is speaking. From then, that became my dream and a goal of my life.

After working on several jobs related to speech recognition, I found myself jobless at a point and CMU happened to hire a developer for Sphinx. That's the reason why I become the current maintainer of Sphinx, an open source speech recognizer. By then, I started to addict to tracing speech recognizer source code. This partially explains why even this is my personal page; I will still talk about a lot of things of speech recognition.

When I don't play with speech recognizers, I spent most of my time in reading. When I first come to U.S., I decided to read more English. My hope is when I read a certain number of books, I will put my comments somewhere in my web page. As at now (written at April 30, 2005), I still haven't completed that goal. I can only hope that it can be done soon.