(Alexandria,VA-2/15/13) When I stepped in Morrison House, a kimpton hotel in Alexandria, I knew that this is one of the most enchanting places I've ever been to--from its classic, sophisticated interior design to its awe-inspiring French-American fine cuisine, and of course to its famous night performances by Bob Smith group. Bob was THE Presidential pianist in residence at the White House for over 30 years, where he served US presidents from Nixon to Clinton. His night performances at Morrison House are sensational as always, which include a key session featuring his jazz piano with trumpet soloist Robert Vetter and Ed Smith(audio engineer), and a singing session featuring the most classic songs from the jazz/pop repertoire. I sit down at the piano and played Chopin's Waltz in c-sharp minor and Liszt's Liebestraum nº3. I felt that I haven't played a piano this good for a long time. It is probably a piano best for jazz, but I enjoy that sharp sensitivity and rich tone of its strings. I had a warm chat with the former White House pianist, who generously praised me and thanked me for my classical offering to the audience. I told Bob that I was so fond of jazz music but never learned how to play it."You obviously got your finger techniques down and that sensitivity of the touch on the keyboard", Bob smiled. "I challenge you to come back in six months to play some jazz for me!" Bob laughed. "When I see that you can do it in six months even though you can't do it now, I will be more surprised!" And he gave me the great advice that you always get no matter you're learning piano or computer programming, which is obviously no exception for learning jazz piano: "The best way to learn it is by doing it!" It was a memorable night, and the first #public# performance I had on piano since I came to DC. Thank you to the wonderful Lin Cui and Manuel Escamilla (and Mia Miao), who celebrated their marriage and I dedicate my performance to!
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March 6–April 6
The New York Philharmonic invites you to its first-ever Bach Festival, a kaleidoscopic five-week celebration of the depth and breadth of his genius. Each program is led by a conductor with his own unique approach. When you combine their perspectives with the virtuosity of the Philharmonic and some of the world’s best Bach soloists, you have the makings of a truly unforgettable experience. Join us on this journey. be active. go out and exercise in the morning. keep your home clean.later, wherever you do your work, you will feel energized.
Dr. Pedro J. Moren of Google talked about the process of developing speech recognition for over 30 languages including pig Latin:
Abstract--"The speech team at google has built speech recognition systems in more that 40 languages in little more than 3 years. In this talk I will describe the history of this project and what technologies have been developed to achieve this goal. I'll explore a bit some of the acoustic modeling, lexicon, language modeling, infrastructure and even socialengineering techniques used to achieve our ultimate goal, to build speech recognition systems in the top 300 languages of the planet as fast as possible." For me the technical aspect is simple but running a company is more complicated: lots of solutions to what seem to be non-trivial messiness in speech signal are simply to ignore them, as we have to constantly think about whether it's worth it to spend lots of money and time to incorporate some feature that won't even make that much of a difference. This I have never considered in academia. And apparently, even Google has to consider money!(LDC data is too expensive!) The first day I walked through the Key Bridge over potomac at sunset in 2013. It was freezing! and there are chunks of ice floa
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