April 2001 (Newstream) -- The new American TelEdCommunications Alliance will link education and telecommunications to provide schools, colleges, state agencies, libraries and other nonprofit groups with several benefits in telecommunications services.

The Alliance has been formed by a groundbreaking agreement among a national nonprofit telecommunications association and the nation's four educational compacts - representing all areas of the country. It is the first time that these five organizations have joined forces to form an alliance. The agreement was signed Wednesday here at the Southern Regional Education Board.

The Alliance's mission is to provide low-cost access to top-quality telecommunications programs and to give education an organized way to exert leadership in building technology policies and standards.

The founding members of the Alliance are MiCTA, a national telecommunications association of more than 12,000 nonprofit organizations; the Midwestern Higher Education Commission (MHEC); the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE); the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB); and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). The leaders of the five organizations will serve as board members.

"MiCTA is pleased to join with the nation's compacts in forming this new initiative. As with MiCTA's current programs, any nonprofit educational organization in the country - as well as other nonprofit and government organizations - may participate in and benefit from the American TelEdCommunications Alliance," said Ken Johnson, MiCTA president. "They will be able to take advantage of the collective purchasing power of the Alliance and address the constant changes that are such a part of this field."

"A primary emphasis will be to establish effective contracts for basic and advanced telecommunications services in support of schools and colleges," said Mark Musick, SREB president and president-elect of the Alliance. "The contracts will be aimed at providing lower costs, wider access and higher quality."

"Telecommunications is clearly of growing importance to education. ... The new Alliance promises significant potential benefits in telecommunication services for both education and government," said David Murphy, MHEC president and Alliance president. "The Alliance will give our schools and colleges a tangible way to influence how telecommunications services are developed to meet educational needs."

"The Alliance will address many issues - including standards and policies, information exchange and training, in addition to telecommunications services provided through contracts - as part of its mission," said Jack Hoy, NEBHE president and secretary/treasurer of the Alliance.

"States and institutions will be able to use their investments in higher education much more efficiently and effectively, supporting programs and better utilizing existing capacities," said David Longanecker, WICHE executive director and vice president of the Alliance. "The potential benefits clearly indicate the advantages of states and regions in the country working together."

The Alliance's work will be accomplished in several ways:

• Through the efforts of the Alliance, educational organizations will be able to make telecommunications purchases at lower costs.
• Alliance members will receive the most up-to-date information on telecommunications services.
• Colleges, schools, state agencies and libraries will have access to better and faster solutions to problems and questions in the telecommunications field.

Colleges and universities, schools, state agencies, libraries and other nonprofit organizations may participate in the contracts and programs of the Alliance by paying a $75 annual membership fee.

Information about the American TelEdCommunications Alliance is available through its Web site at www.ATAlliance.org.

Wanted: 100 High-School Teachers for Development in Latest Computing Technologies

The National Science Foundation awarded a $1.03-million grant to a consortium of nine educational institutions to train 100 high school math and science teachers in the latest computer technologies. One-hundred teachers will begin the program at SC2001, the annual conference on high-performance networking and computing, to be held November 10-16 in Denver.

Consortium members include the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, East Carolina University, Krell Institute, National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NPACI/San Diego Supercomputer Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio Supercomputer Center, Shodor Education Foundation, Inc., Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and University of Alabama-Huntsville.

Leading industry partners have pledged major support. Compaq donated laptops, so teachers can continue participation when they return to their districts. High Performance Systems donated Stella modeling software. Microsoft Corporation donated Microsoft Office Premium and Windows operating system licenses. ACM, IEEE Computer Society and National Aeronautics and Space Administration sponsored 15 teacher teams. Cisco Systems and SBC DataComm donated wireless cards. And Wolfram Research donated Mathematica. The Shodor Education Foundation and the SC2001 Conference provided teacher support funds.

Teams with two science teachers, one mathematics teacher and one school administrator from the same school district or cooperating districts will be selected from a national pool of applications. Teacher teams can learn more about the program and submit applications through the "SC2001 Teacher Team Application"link at http://www.sc2001.org/education.shtml. Applications are due by Monday, May 28, 2001.

Jeffrey C. Huskamp, SC2001 Education Chair and principal investigator for the grant, explained that the first step will be to instruct the teachers to use the tools, techniques and technologies of computational science at the SC2001 conference, as a way to spark interest and pursue scientific methods in their classrooms.

"Computational science can open unexplored worlds, from subatomic particles to the distant reaches of our universe, in the class room," Huskamp said. "This program will help teachers motivate students to expand their interest in scientific inquiry and problem solving through hands-on modeling, simulation and visualization. Once they get started, we expect students to use their knowledge as a springboard to greater discoveries."

After the SC2001 conference, selected teachers will refine their new teaching methods and incorporate them into their daily lessons over the next 18 months. The following summer teachers will attend a two-week program at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. In between, monthly on-line seminars and teleconferences will provide ongoing support and additional topics.

"We hope that teachers learn to use computational science as a motivator for students not only to learn science and mathematics, but to realize the thrill of scientific inquiry and problem solving," said Edna Gentry of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "As a result of teacher and student involvement in computational science, students learn how to apply scientific method, develop higher-order thinking skills and learn to communicate better."

For the first time, the NSF-funded teacher enhancement project will combine experienced staff from high-school-teacher professional-development programs across the country. The goal is to create teacher leaders in computational science in 18 months, so they can incorporate computational science into their school districts.

SC2001 is an industry leading, high-performance computing and networking conference, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society. For more information, visit their website.

Software Transforms Diane Sawyer's Image & Voice into Animation Demo

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 5, 2001--At the Tucker-Maxon Oral School in Portland, Ore., deaf children ages 6 through 12 are improving their listening and speech-production skills with the help of Baldi, a dome-headed, talking, computer-generated face.

Tucker-Maxon's unusual talking tutor -- along with the powerful software technology that combines 3D animation with speech recognition and audio-visual generation of speech -- will be showcased on the ABC-TV news program Prime Time on Thursday, March 8 (10 p.m. Eastern). To demonstrate the power and accuracy of the software as a teaching tool for the profoundly deaf, the voice and face of Prime Time's co-anchor Diane Sawyer will be converted to a so-called conversational agent.

The software that allows the animated face of Sawyer -- and Baldi -- to talk and be understood by Tucker-Maxon students is Sensory Inc.'s Fluent Animated Speech(TM) technology. Sensory, based in Santa Clara, is a leading provider of embedded speech technology.

Origins of the Software

Sensory's Fluent Animated Speech software had its beginnings through research and development efforts primarily at the Oregon Graduate Institute Center for Spoken Language Understanding and at the Perceptual Science Laboratory at University of California-Santa Cruz. In 1997, researchers from these two institutions left their academic posts to found Beaverton, Ore.-based Fluent Speech Technologies, which Sensory acquired last October.

Technology Behind the Tucker-Maxon Story

With Sensory's Fluent Animated Speech technology, programmers and non-programmers alike can control the facial expressions, emotional expressions and lip synchronization of an animated 3D agent or avatar. At Tucker-Maxon, for example, educators with minimal computer skills easily design programs that both speak and listen. The software incorporates the animated face, Baldi, whose articulators are aligned with the utterances produced in either synthesized or natural speech. The motion of Baldi's lips, eyes and facial expressions add meaning to the words "spoken" by the computer. Around a topic chosen by the teacher, Baldi can ask a question; the student will be prompted to respond. That response will determine the next turn of the dialogue.

"The ability to create realistic, talking characters is no longer of interest solely to professional animators or producers of motion pictures," said Todd Mozer, president and chief executive officer of Sensory. "Our Fluent Animated Speech technology will bring such capabilities within the reach of nearly everyone."

Applications in Education and Beyond

By achieving its unprecedented accuracy of speech and facial animation, Sensory's Fluent Animated Speech technology will enable animated characters to play roles in Internet-based commerce, entertainment and customer support as well as education. Possible applications include adding an animated agent to a text or voice message; automating an interactive web host or agent; adding personality and emotional expressions to a web character or message; and creating online games in which the players control the speech of the characters.

New Animation Technology Represents a Breakthrough

The Fluent Animated Speech technology employs a non-linear morphing technique that enables Sensory to take a few dozen static pictures and blend them to create a virtually unlimited assortment of expressions and articulations. The technology provides memorable, highly accurate real-time lip-synching, as well as the delivery of emotional content by a 3D animated agent, synchronized to a variety of speech and text sources. The 3D models can be created using off-the-shelf 3D graphics tools.

The speech output comes from Sensory's Fluent Speech(TM) Text-to-Speech engine, which can reside in either a client or server environment. The Fluent Speech Text-to-Speech engine is an LPC (linear predictive coding), diphone-based speech synthesizer capable of expanding or contracting pitch periods and changing speech rates to produce a variety of sounds. The LPC approach makes it possible for the Fluent Animated Speech technology to synthesize high-quality speech using very little computer memory.

The Fluent Animated Speech 3D animation comprises a general-purpose OpenGL- or Direct3D-based real-time 3D rendering engine and a viseme generation engine. (A viseme is the visual component of a phoneme, which is the smallest individual component of speech.) The viseme generation engine is a coarticulation package that generates weighted morphing data (in the form of visemes) that drives the animated speech from either synthetic or natural speech.

The coarticulation package is an important part of Sensory's special speech software code that enables animated characters to speak with realistic facial and mouth movements. In humans, coarticulation is the coordination by the brain of the lips, tongue and jaw to create the movements needed to produce adjacent vowels and consonants simultaneously during normal speech. Coarticulation ensures that speech is produced smoothly, and it spreads out acoustic information about a vowel or consonant to help a listener understand what is being said. With Sensory's coarticulation package, animated characters can communicate at five syllables per second - the same rate that humans produce speech.

The Fluent Speech Animation technology's 3D rendering engine allows the rendering of arbitrary 3D models and uses a morphing-based approach to animation. Exporters for 3D authoring tools enable 3D models to be saved in a compatible format. Additionally, the Fluent Animated Speech technology can take advantage of other vendors' existing tools for the scripting of speech and facial content and the automatic generation of expressions and facial gestures.

Users can control lighting and background images as well as the characters being animated, and AVI output is available. The Sensory technology comes with a selection of human and animal 3D models that include the mouth and facial targets required for animating (i.e., not every feature in a face or mouth needs to be animated - and thus modeled - for creating realistic speech). As a result, users can quickly create realistic animated characters, along with background environments.

Price, Availability and System Requirements

Sensory's Fluent Animated Speech technology is available now. For networked applications, typical pricing is based on an Application Service Provider (ASP) model with an annual per-port fee. For embedded applications, pricing is under $2 per unit in volume. The technology currently runs under Windows 95/98/2000/ME on a minimum 266 MHz Pentium II processor with at least 64 MB of RAM.

About Sensory, Inc.

Founded in 1994, Sensory, Inc., is the leading provider of high-quality, low-cost speech recognition and speech synthesis technology. Sensory's speech technology is embedded in consumer products such as personal electronics, Internet appliances, interactive toys, and high-end telephone and automotive applications. Sensory offers a complete line of integrated circuit (IC) and embedded software solutions, including the Interactive Speech(TM) line of low-cost ICs and the Fluent Speech(TM) large-vocabulary software engine. Sensory's customers include leading companies in the consumer electronics and embedded product markets, such as JVC, Hasbro, Mitsubishi, Mattel, Sega, Sharper Image, Fisher-Price, Sony, Tektronix, Toshiba, Uniden, VOS and Westclox. More information is available from Sensory's web site at www.sensoryinc.com.

Note to Editors: Interactive Speech, Fluent Speech and Fluent Animated Speech are trademarks of Sensory, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Details about the Tucker-Maxon application is available at http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/tm

CONTACTS:   Sensory, Inc.
Erik Soule, 408/240-1575, marcom@sensoryinc.com
Martell Communications
Lisa Figlioli, 203/625-0082, lfiglioli@martellpr.com

INDEPENDENCE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION GRANT SUPPORTS CIVIL RIGHTS EDUCATION PROJECT IN BROOKLYN 

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- On the eve of Black History Month, the New York chapter of the Sojourn civil rights project today proudly announced the receipt of a grant from the Independence Community Foundation (ICF) that will underwrite a Brooklyn public high school student for a 10-day travel-study program to civil rights landmarks in the South.  The student will join a group of New York City and California students who qualify for expeditions scheduled for spring 2001.  In addition to this student scholarship, the ICF grant will provide organizational support for Sojourn to present a course on civil rights history to students from Brooklyn high schools and non-profit programs.

Marilyn G. Gelber, Executive Director of ICF, said: “Independence Foundation is pleased to support such a worthy project.  We are particularly delighted that this $5,000 grant will allow a Brooklyn student to explore firsthand the roots of our nation’s civil rights movement and personally observe the extraordinary change that leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped to bring about. By understanding history, young people will be better prepared to combat bigotry today. 

ICF’s advocacy on behalf of Sojourn has been a vital factor in successfully introducing the project to Brooklyn and its broad network of philanthropic support.  According to Sojourn board member NY State Assemblyman Roger Green (57^th AD), “The staff at ICF vetted the program as it rolled out in Brooklyn last summer.  Then they pledged their support.  And then they went the extra mile, providing introductions to other supporters.  Without the foresight and generosity of ICF, Sojourn’s presence in New York would still be a dream.  ICF made it real.”  Mr. Green chairs the Assembly Committee on Children & Families in Albany.

Sojourn provides an opportunity for high school students from New York City, San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles to travel to the South and study the civil rights era in intimate settings.  The program’s itinerary includes Washington DC, Atlanta, Tuskegee, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, Little Rock and Memphis.  By way of a “living history” syllabus — books, documentaries, recordings and on-site visits with civil rights veterans — lessons of tolerance, nonviolence, personal courage, compassion, forgiveness, faith, hope, justice and civic responsibility are imparted during expeditions. 

John Lewis (U.S. Congressman), Myrlie Evers-Williams (Medgar Evers’ widow), members of the Little Rock Nine, voting rights pioneer Robert Moses, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (leader of the 1963 Birmingham movement), Chris McNair (father of one of four little girls killed in a Birmingham church bombing) and Martin Luther King III, among others, meet with students and teachers during their many stops through the South.

Since February 1999, Sojourn has conducted eight civil rights expeditions.  More than 665 participants have met with civil rights veterans who have shared the program’s ethical lesson plans.  By the end of this school year, Sojourn will have served more than 1000 students.  To visit Sojourn’s Web site, click: www.sojournproject.org.  To visit the Web site of the Independence Community Foundation, click: www.icfny.org.   

“Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”