Author Archives: Raffi Khatchadourian

Slides from “Android Apps the Right Way”

Slides from yesterday’s talk on Android app development by Michael Barnathan.

Android Apps The Right Way

Computer Systems Technology Colloquium Series presents:
Android Apps The Right Way

Michael Barnathan

COMPUTER SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY
NEW YORK CITY COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
300 JAY ST.
BROOKLYN, NY 11201

Thursday, March 5, 2015 12-1pm
ROOM N906
LIGHT REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED!

“Mobile is eating the world,” but few developers realize that mobile software is written very differently from desktop software. This leads to lots of mobile apps that simply don’t work well, suck up battery power, or can’t recover from being put into the background. I’ll discuss a few such apps on the Android platform, and explain how they should have been written to improve user experience, illustrating general mobile development principles by example.

Dr. Michael Barnathan is a Director of Engineering at Amplify Access, which deploys educational tablets to K-12 schools across the country. Prior to joining Amplify, Michael founded Clipless, the first contextual deals startup, which survived two appearances on the front page of TechCrunch and was acquired 8 months from founding. Michael’s prior experience also includes a Senior Software Engineer position at Google. He holds a Ph. D. in machine learning from Temple University, with a particular emphasis on using computer vision techniques to automatically diagnose medical scans.

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Michael speaking about Android App development.

Michael speaking about Android App development.

 

Slides for the “More than Words: Advancing Prosodic Analysis” Talk

The slides for the “More than Words: Advancing Prosodic Analysis” talk by Andrew Rosenberg are now available on SlideShare.

More than Words: Advancing Prosodic Analysis

Computer Systems Technology Colloquium Series presents:
More than Words: Advancing Prosodic Analysis
Andrew Rosenberg

Computer Systems Technology
New York City College of Technology, City University of New York
300 Jay St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Thursday, February 5, 2015 12-1pm
Room N906
Light refreshments will be served!

Prosody is an essential component of human speech. Prosody, broadly, describes all of the production qualities of speech that are not involved in conveying lexical information. Where the words are “what is said”, prosody is “how it is said”. Prosody of speech, plays an important role not only in communicating the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of spoken language, but also in conveying information about the speaker and their internal state (e.g. emotion or fatigue).

Understanding prosody is critical to understanding speech communication. Spoken language processing (SLP) technology that approaches human levels of competence will necessarily include automatic analysis of prosody. Despite the importance of prosody in spoken communication, researchers are often unable to reliably incorporate prosodic information into applications. One explanation is a lack of compact, consistent, and universal representations of prosodic information. This talk will describe the state of the art in prosodic analysis and its use in spoken language processing with a focus on the development of new representations of prosody.

Andrew Rosenberg is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Queens College (CUNY) and a member of the Doctoral Faculty of the Computer Science and Linguistics programs at the CUNY Graduate Center. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2009. Dr. Rosenberg leads the Speech Lab @ Queens College and is a NSF CAREER Award winner. His research concerns Natural Language Processing, Spoken Language Processing, Prosody/Intonation and Machine Learning. He also collaborates part time at the IBM TJ Watson Research Lab, where he helps improve the speech synthesis quality for Watson, the Jeopardy! playing system.

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Slides for the “Software at Scale” Talk

The slides for the “Software at Scale” talk by Michael Barnathan are now available on SlideShare.

Software at Scale

Software Engineering Seminar Series:
Software at Scale
Michael Barnathan

Computer Systems Technology
New York City College of Technology
300 Jay St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Tuesday, November 25 1-2pm
Room N119
Light refreshments will be served!

Can your app handle an appearance on the front page of TechCrunch? In this talk, we’ll compare common design patterns and strategies for building software that can scale to millions of users and beyond, such as concurrency, caching, CDNs, compression, immutability, sharding, partial ordering, and read optimization. We’ll discuss why the REST paradigm has become such a natural fit for building web and app backend services, as well as how to test your app for scalability so you can be confident that it will survive an unexpected spike in traffic.

Michael Barnathan is a Director of Engineering at Amplify Access, which deploys educational tablets to K-12 schools across the country. Prior to joining Amplify, Michael founded Clipless, the first contextual deals startup, which survived two appearances on the front page of TechCrunch, gained massive traction in a short period of time, and was acquired 8 months from founding. Michael’s prior experience also includes a Senior Software Engineer position at Google, where he worked on their build pipeline, creating software to compile millions of lines of source code in under 1 second. He holds a Ph. D. in machine learning from Temple University, with a particular emphasis on using computer vision techniques to automatically diagnose medical scans. In his spare time, Michael enjoys genetic engineering, piano, and composition.

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