Voting is Just a Precision and Recall Optimization Problem

It’s hard to avoid the constant bickering about the results of our last election. Should mail-in voting be legal? Do we need stricter voter identification laws? Was there fraud in the last election? Did it impact the results? These are just a fraction of the questions circulating around elections and voter integrity these days. Sadly, …

“If you start me up I’ll never stop …” Until We Successfully Exit

“Hey, our fledgling startup is on path to being the next *INSERT BIG TECH COMPANY NAME HERE* and we think you’re a great fit for our CTO role”. Find me a technical leader who hasn’t been enticed by those words and you’ll have found a liar. So, what happens when one succumbs to the temptation …

Pair Programming or Bare(ly) Programming

“Sorry we don’t have enough resources, we only have four pairs” – As an engineering leader no other statement has made me cringe more.  After all four pairs is a healthy sized team of eight developers.  Throughout my career I have run across CTOs, VPs, directors, development managers, teams, and individual developers who swear by …

End-to-End Speech Recognition: Part 1 – Neural Networks for Executives (I Mean Dummies)

When I originally contemplated the subject of my next blog post, I thought it might be interesting to provide a thorough explanation of the latest and greatest speech recognition algorithms, often referred to as End-to-End Speech Recognition, Deep Speech, or Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC).   However, as I began to research the topic I quickly discovered …

Creating a Management Philosophy

Just In case you couldn’t infer this from my previous posts some folks consider me opinionated and occasionally dogmatic.  What else would you expect from a born and raised New Yorker, who grew up in a household where arguing your point was considered a cultural birthright! Unfortunately, while having strong opinions and ideas can be …

Twitter Feed

[rotatingtweets screen_name=’speechwrecko’  include_rts=’1′ tweet_count=’20’ timeout=’5000′]

Managing Research Projects in an Agile Development Environment

Anyone who has worked in an agile organization has found that certain projects don’t quiet fit the agile mold.   Nowhere is this more apparent than with research oriented projects.   After all if there is complete uncertainty in the scope and outcome of a project, as would be the case in a research project, how do …

Microsoft’s 5.1% Word Error Rate (WER) Announcement is Complete and Utter Bullshit

I apologize! That title was actually generated by Microsoft’s speech recognition system incorrectly transcribing “Microsoft’s 5.1% Word Error Rate (WER) Announcement is Completely Misleading”.   Okay, that was snarky, but I promise Microsoft compelled me to write that.  You see in the course of editing my previous post Microsoft had to go and put out a …

Hello World!

I’m back!  After a long hiatus from blogging I’ve decided to give it a go again.  I’d like to use this blog as a forum for sharing my thoughts on advanced technologies like speech recognition, audio signal processing, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.   Additionally I will be covering my theories on how to manage …