Question: The main points of the discussion are the design goal and price of a new television remote control project. The group first put forward the design goal of remote control. Then they got used to the whiteboard and wrote down everyone's favourite animal and their characteristics. Project manager and Marketing wanted to sell this remote control for twenty five Euro and expected profit will be around two million Euro. Then, the group thought about colour and function features of the new remote controls. In addition, they also believed that the remote control should be safe enough for children to use, and the appearance should be acceptable to them.


Question: They wanted it to be original, trendy, user-friendly, durable, creative and characteristic, so it can be very intuitive that people could use the product. In addition, the price, cost and expected profit of the remote control were also determined. In the part of creativity, they pointed out that creativity should have its own characteristics and ensure its fashion without affecting its functionality, so as to truly "introduce fashion into electronics". In terms of function, it is necessary to simplify the switch and guarantee function.


Question: Project Manager wanted to make a profit of 50 million euros for a cost of 12.50 euros for 25 euros worldwide.


Question: Industrial Designers believed that in the design of remote control, fashion should have individuality and combine with function to achieve a perfect fit between fashion and electronics. Beyond that, it should be original in order to be unique.


Question: The group felt that the remote control didn't need a lot of buttons,and on the basis of ensuring originality, it should also ensure conventionality and make it applicable to all kinds of groups.


Question: The Marketing thought buttons can be omitted, just like cell phones, because many of the functions of buttons, such as the TV button, are generally not used. But they can set up a menu-style button if they really need to.


Question: They felt that the battery design should be long-lived, original, and conventional to ensure the battery's innovation, versatility, and durability. It should also not be far from the usual performance, or it may cause problems for new users.


Question: The meeting was mainly about the exchange of the preliminary ideas about a new TV remote control project. They first got used to the whiteboard and drew some animals with it. Project manager wanted to sell this remote control for 25 Euro and expected profit will be around fifty million Euro. Afterwards the team raised different opinions about function and fashion features of the new remote controls . In particular, they emphasized the fashion of the remote control should be combined with the function, and the design of the battery should be original and not far away from the conventional design.


Question: The group discussed recognition results generated for 20 minutes of close-talking microphone data. Recognition performance was very good, indicating promising results for forced alignment procedures and the ability to analyze other important signal information, e.g. prosody and overlapping speech. It was decided that close-talking data should be downsampled and fed to the SRI recognizer to compare recognition performance, and that data from the far-field microphones should be tested on the recognizer as soon as possible.


Question: Following close-talking microphone recognition procedures, it was decided that data from the far-field microphones (or PZMs) should be tested on the recognizer as soon as possible. Speaker mn017 will compare close-talking microphone recognition results with those obtained for downsampled data. The SRI recognizer will be set up at ICSI to enable researchers to run their own variants.


Question: The group decided to purchase one additional head-mounted crown microphone. A tentative decision was also made to acquire a hand-held wireless microphone to pass around to additional meeting participants should the installation of more close-talking microphones prove too difficult.


Question: The group discussed recognition results generated for 20 minutes of close-talking microphone data. Recognition performance was very good, indicating promising results for forced alignment procedures and the ability to analyze other important signal information, e.g. prosody and overlapping speech. It was decided that close-talking data should be downsampled and fed to the SRI recognizer to compare recognition performance, and that data from the far-field microphones should be tested on the recognizer as soon as possible. The group also discussed recording setup and equipment issues.


Question: The revised semantic specification and construction formalism are more stable than the previous versions. In the latter, we find both construction types and meaning types along with formal considerations like verb subcategorization, or the ones a "directed motion" construction would dictate.


Question: The semantic specification, on the other hand, is split into three levels: "scenario" is a list of schemas and bindings between them, which describes the current event in terms of Source-Path-Goal, Container, etc.; "referent" is about the entities in the discourse and includes grammatical information and pointers to the ontology; "discourse segment" comprises utterance-specific things.


Question: Mental spaces can be tackled with mechanisms that can also deal with context issues (time, space etc.): creating a base space and rules of interaction with other interconnected spaces. However, the complexity of these mechanisms has to be bound as well: it is necessary to define the range of constructions to be studied.


Question: Given the domains currently used (tourist, child language learning), some features, like speaker attitude, are not of equal importance at this stage. On the other hand, it was decided for the inheritance between constructions to be left out for now, as the notation can be rendered more elegant later on.


Question: The revised semantic specification and construction formalism are more stable than the previous versions. Semantic constraints also come into play. The semantic specification, on the other hand, is split into three levels: "scenario" is a list of schemas and bindings between them, which describes the current event in terms of Source-Path-Goal, Container, etc.; "referent" is about the entities in the discourse and includes grammatical information and pointers to the ontology; "discourse segment" comprises utterance-specific things. Apart from the presentation, JavaBayes can now run through the modified web page of the project.


Question: Last run of experiments showed that adding more languages was still severely harming model performance. They noted that normalization of any kind has a good effect on the model, whereas MSG does nothing.


Question: The professor noted that the results were better than he expected and that the MSG did nothing. He also noted that adding French and Spanish to the multilingual English model hurt the model.


Question: PhD A thought that most of the nets are not that good, except for the multi English. MSG was not bringing as much information as he thought it would. He explained that even when the features were not normalized, the neural network would perform at 90%, as it would with normalization.


Question: The team discussed testing a multi-band approach that is more resistance to noise. The professor thought that it many not be a bad idea to put together several MLP's to improve performance. The team also thought that there might be problems with the pronunciation models.


Question: The professor generally liked MSG because of its different temporal properties. Nonetheless, he recognized that it might not be practical to explore it further due to time constraints. At this point, he thought that there were no clear solutions to the challenges they were facing, but there was still plenty to do.


Question: The professor asked if the team was happy with their progress. The team thought that they were okay. The professor was insistent that everyone be happy since they were pretty much done.


Question: The participants went over the results of the most recent experiments, discussing future directions to take. Adding in more languages was still decreasing model performance. The best network consisted of the TIMIT and noise. The team thought that they should try to reduce their dependence on noise in the data. The Professor outlined how they could continue their experimentation.


Question: Except for the Project Manager, the other three members of the group all did a presentation to show their research findings on the television remote. The Industrial Designer suggested not to use too much metal in case they would disturb the signals. After him, the User Interface focused on the functions that he proposed neither to make the remote too confusing nor cheap-looking. The last one is the Marketing and she introduced the consumer preference as well as the existing problem of easily losing the remote.


Question: The Marketing proposed to use voice control on the remote and according to his research, three quarters of people under 35 are in favour of voice control. At the same time, in order to keep the remote not so easy to be lost as its counterparts of other brands, voice control would be an essential technique. For those two reasons, the Marketing persuaded the Project Manager to target their consumers as the youth.


Question: To cater to the potential consumers aged under 35, the group decided to use voice control to locate the remote. During their discussion of the voice control technique on the remote control, they also took into consideration several detailed problems. They planned to set the control range within 200 feet and arrange a voice-controlled sticky pad on top of the television on which there would also be a page button.


Question: Due to the limited budget as well as to achieve a satisfying user experience, the Project Manager proposed only to keep the most essential functions in case they would be beyond the capacity of the microchip.


Question: The group talked about the material and they found it would be hard to balance the budget and the quality. In order to save the cost and ensure satisfying user experience, the Project Manager decided to choose high-quality recycled plastic as the material. But in terms of the battery, he would pay a lot to equip the remote with a cutting-edge lithium battery.


Question: In terms of putting fashion into the electronics, this is both their slogan and their design target. Apart from the company colour of black and red, the Project Manager came up with the idea of providing skins for the users. But the members were not in favour of this idea for that the work would be huge, at the same time, they were inspired to add the logo on the boot-up screen and introduce a dormant mode because most people do not want the remote to be flashing when the TV is on.


Question: The meeting was about a second-stage idea of the new television remote. The meeting began with individual presentations in which the members shared their personal views towards the design, the target consumers and the functions and so on. Later they also paid attention to the marketing method like how to limit the cost within 12.5 euros and include the multi functions in only one microchip. What is also important, they allocated some time to the issue of putting fashion into the design, for example, using plastic material and carefully choosing the company colour and the slogan on the screen.


Question: The Prime Minister was adamant that fraud was unacceptable and reiterated that fraudsters would have to return the money. Nonetheless, the government's priority remained the speedy disbursement of funds to those that were in need.


Question: The Minister of Seniors clarified that his office recognizes that seniors are in great need. The minister explained that those receiving OAS and GIS are getting payments of $200 and $300 respectively. The minister was insistent that this was not an insignificant amount.


Question: The Prime Minister clarified that while young people are in need of funds, especially due to loss of income over the summer, they are also in need of work experience. The government would start providing the Canada emergency student benefit which will assist in this by making both jobs and money available.


Question: Bains said that the government has been accommodating of small businesses in the past and it will continue to do so. The government has increased the threshold for individual companies and looks forward to making further adjustments. Bains emphasized that 590,000 loans have already been distributed through the CEBA program, highlighting its efficacy.


Question: Morneau explained that the government was committed to supporting Canadians. It came into the pandemic with a strong fiscal position, and while the pandemic will bring challenges, it will face those challenges while supporting small businesses and Canadians.


Question: Bains said that the threshold for the program had been lowered to a 15% decline in revenue from a 30% decline. Businesses will also be able to compare losses to more recent time periods due to greater flexibility. Bain clarified that the government is listening to businesses and recognizes its need to be agile.


Question: Bains claimed that the government was aware of these issues and had allocated $500 million to arts and culture organizations. Bains also explained that while pandemic control efforts were affecting these industries adversely, Canadians' health and safety remained the government's priority.


Question: The participants discussed the government's response to the coronavirus. Participants expressed concern over a variety of matters that ranged from welfare transfers to protecting small businesses. The Prime Minister was questioned on alleged fraud in the distribution of pandemic relief funds. The participants were also concerned about government handling of business loans during the pandemic and the lack of statistics around the pandemic. A lot of the meeting's attention was paid to seasonal industries, like tourism and fishing, which had been served a major blow by the pandemic. Some participants also expressed concern about the distribution of funds and resources to vulnerable populations, like students and the elderly. Aside from the pandemic, some participants were concerned about the impact of recent gun control legislation.


Question: The team wanted to understand how they could combine different linguistic features to make a more robust recognition model. They were running experiments to figure out what the good features were. The team also entertained the possibility of clustering them, which would add to the robustness.


Question: The professor was not too excited about clustering. He thought that the team could identify the bands that were the most promising and weigh them more highly in the model. As it stood, the model was using all bands with equal strength.


Question: The professor recounted that the person who worked with positional parameters, Mark Randolph, is at Motorola. He explained that his model consisted of many continuous variables and that heading in that direction would become a research project in and of itself.


Question: PhD B was conducting an experiment to improve the backend performance of the Aurora recognizer. The goal was recognizing the HTK system by challenging the canonical paradigm.


Question: PhD B focused on Italian and experimented with the number of states for different words. PhD B thought training for each case may improve performance by accounting for the difference in variance.


Question: The Professor thought that the experiments were pretty simple, so computational power was not really a problem. He also thought that it would be okay to increase the states from six to nine.


Question: The meeting began with the team catching up the professor, who had missed the previous meeting. Then, the team moved onto talking about echo cancelling techniques. They were trying to get the voice of other people from the primary person's microphone. Then, the team discussed how they could improve the performance on the Aurora task by playing around with the model. The team ended the meeting with various comments on different topics.


Question: Industrial Designer suggested that big size devices are hard to use and easily broken while a big button is more useful compared to a hundred small buttons. User Inter face believed that a LED on the remote control device helps the users know the battery usage and the device is working well. Marketing thought it would be convenient if one remote control could control all the devices. All these are accepted by the whole team.


Question: Project Manager believed that it could not be heavy. Industrial Designer indicated that fewer and bigger buttons are better and should be bust-free, for instance, rubber could be used on it. Industrial Designer also suggested that when users push a button, they could hear some sort of bleep. User Interface suggested a LED on the corner and not too expensive material like plastic could be used. Marketing added that it should look nice for better sales and should work with as many as possible of existing products listed on their website. Industrial Designer also concluded that it should be battery-saving.


Question: Project Manager introduced the overall plan for designing the product that has to be original, trendy and user-friendly to the team and asked each team member to draw a painting with a technical device. The team shared their experiences with remote control devices and gave ideas about the new remote control product features. They decided that the new device should be good-looking, easy to use and cost saving.


Question: Marketing presented on functional requirements, found that 75% of users would like to pay more on a remote with a better look and it might be sensible to make a beeping device because 50% of users lost their controls in the room. Marketing also suggested designing a remote that would be easy to pick up and use. Lastly, Marketing suggested targeting a younger group market, and most young people were keen on LCD and speech recognition.


Question: Project Manager thought the beeping device was not easy to learn but Industrial Marketing thought the design expert should put more time on the ease of use design than a manual because they didn't have much time. While Project Manager mentioned that they were a design team, they could find some writers to make a manual point which could help maintain consistency with the older remote manual for the users.


Question: Marketing mentioned that the research found it would be costly for the speech design and suggested considering LCD screens. Industrial Design suggested that they would consider both and see what they could find. The group all agreed on it.pressing the button.


Question: Industrial designer introduced the working design including the energy, LED sender, different user interface, and the chipboard with buttons on it. They could put every button under the thumb with an RSI. Then, the group discussed and decided to have removable fronts, a small centralized LCD screen, and a power button with 10 other setting buttons.


Question: Compared with the current manufacturer design, User Interface mentioned that they should reduce the option to control the DVD. And according to the new requirements, they need to control the maximum number of buttons within ten.


Question: Marketing suggested putting a small LCD screen on top of the remote but Industrial Designer against it because a remote should be started with the power button and User Interface thought it would be unnatural to put the LCD on the top. Then, Marketing mentioned that would be where users' handball might be. So Industrial Designer thought they could put the whole interface a bit down so there would be room for the interface.


Question: This meeting was about the functional design of the remote control. Firstly, the Project Manager mentioned new requirements including one recognizable button in the middle, the handy design, rubber materials and they would not use teletext. Next, Marketing presented on functional requirements including a fancy look, ease of use, and the LCD as well as speech recognition. Then, Industrial Designer introduced technical design and working design on remote interfaces. Lastly, User Interface presented on component design and the group decided to adopt a user-centered approach to reduce the main buttons and put a big circle in the middle with the power button, channel, and volume buttons.