NASA
On Tuesday, April 26th, 2016 – an event was organized at the Townview Magnet Center High School: “Math and Science Lecture Series: “NASA Downlink””, by US Congresswoman Johnson (30th District in Dallas). CRSS (Center for Robust Speech Systems) participated with UTDallas (SEEC – Lani Connolly (who organized the event from UTD), Physics Dept. (John Hoffman) and William Hanson Center for Space Sciences (Rod Heelis)). The event featured talks from US Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (30th District of Texas), UTDallas VP for Research Bruce Gnade, Prof. John Hoffman (UTDallas Physis), Prof. Rod Heelis (UTDallas Physis), and Prof. John Hansen (UTDallas Johnsson School; CRSS – Center Robust Speech Systems). The event included a live video downlink with the ISS: International Space Station (NASA Astronaut Jeff Williams and ESA Astronaut Tim Peake). Below are pictures and videos from the event. More than 200 high school students participated, and 20 were able to ask 1-on-1 questions live with the ISS (of course – the astronauts had problems getting their wireless microphone to work on the ISS and had to switch to a Space-Station wired mic instead!). For CRSS-UTDallas – our students and staff have been working on an NSF funded project (with Univ. of Maryland – Prof. Doug Oard) for speech/language processing of audio from the Apollo program which includes recent 4 month digitizing effort to recover 19,000hrs of audio from Apollo-11,13,1, and Gemini-8. A total of 5 UTDesign Senior Design Teams have also been involved in this project over the past 3 years (including a current team this term who attended). We want to specifically thank Lani Connolly and SEEC – for their extensive efforts in coordinating and support of science and engineering outreach to the community, and especially for this event. This certainly was a memorable experience for our students and staff from UTDallas-CRSS!
