Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

Right now (as I am typing this) Ned Batchelder is giving his “A Whirlwind Excursion through C Extensions” talk at the Boston Python Meetup. This is a talk which he will be giving at PyCon; a talk I argued for as part of the program committee (with full conflict of interest information given). It is scheduled against some other very good talks (I know, I did the schedule, mores the fool me). I did want to have a chance to see this talk before PyCon in the small atmosphere that is Beta House, and have a chance to give feedback and ask more questions than I ever will later on. I feel like I am failing here. The snow was just the last straw on top of an already insane schedule.

Besides, why travel 30min to see and help a friend when we can both travel half a continent in a few weeks and not talk to each other there!

So here is a public apology of sorts to Ned. I hope we can connect at PyCon and have a chance to chat for more than 5min.

With luck the video of the presentation will be put up on ustream soon like the James Tauber Pinax one was (James is 15min away from me, same story).

I have not had much time lately to make posts, but one issue has risen to the top. At work we are hiring.

This is nothing new really, the jobs listing is 5 pages long for our Burlington Ma. office alone. What is different, is that the group I work in is hiring. That would be the MREC (Modular Recognizer) Group, which does the development on the core speech recognition engine for a multitude of product lines, including Dragon Naturally Speaking, Mobile Solutions, and Medical Transcription Services to name just three. Yes I know the ‘demos’ suck, you can search youtube and find better examples of the products.

The Core MREC team is has always been a small core group of less than 10 engineers working with research and the product groups. Speech experience is not a requirement (and is actually the exception) for our group. We work with research to develop new features and productize new algorithms. The work is primarily C++ on windows and linux. The code base is the cleanest one I have ever worked on (and I have worked on over three dozen in a number of fields). The code is not old either, as we are continually rewriting parts of the engine, removing obsolete features, and adding in new ones; that is where the ‘M’ in MREC comes into play. Python experience is a big plus. The primary research framework is all python and the core engine is instrumented in python.

If this sounds interesting to you, send in your resume, either via the official nuance form, or by e-mailing me (doug at this site). You can also ask questions in comments to this post.

This post was dictated directly into wordpress using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.