Software Projects Cont'd

Text to Speech: I would enjoy building a simple text to speech implementation some time.

Voice Recognition: Like OCR, this is an important and challenging area of computer science. It would be fun to take a crack at this one.

Command line interface for over-the-phone move quotations: When someone phones you up and says they'd like to move, you often take out pen and paper and start jotting down the details. "9 rooms", "3 bathrooms", "3 bedrooms", etc. Sometimes you might even go room by room, recording the rough contents: "sectional, 50 inch tv, 2 book shelfs", etc. It would be fun to build an AI that could parse those notes and then create an estimated weight, volume, load and unload time. The parser would need to accept a wide range of input formats, but likely you would also promote certain ways of going about things. For instance, you might specify the contents of a room by typing "room name: thing1, thing2, thing3, adjective thing4", such as "living room: couch, tv, rug, large chair", etc. Ideally the parser would act in real time, showing you a running tally of things, and once you were done, you could go on to the next step of taking that weight/volume and preparing a full quotation if desired. The reason I think this type of UI would be valuable is that when you're talking on the phone, you don't have a lot of time to be using a click-based UI, scrolling through long lists of items to find "bar stool" or "guitar", or "rocking horse", etc. About all the time you have is to quickly jot down or type what the person is saying. Could a computer do the rest?

Air Flow Simulation: Sitting in ground school the other day I starting imagining a way to simulate air flow using software:

Model air as a bunch of particles

Particles have mass, velocity, temperature

Particles repel each other

Closer particles repel each other more than distant particles

Warm particle repel their neighbouring particles more than cold particles

Particles give up some of their heat to their neighbours (they radiate their heat)

Particles would be colored according to their heat. Warm particles would be red, cold particles blue.

Heat sources could be placed in the environment. They would warm nearby particles.

It would be interesting to see whether any weather-related phenomenon could be observed. When heated, would "high pressure" areas result? Would rotating air be observed? Maybe I could implement this on the Xbox 360 using XNA.