Student receives undergraduate research fellowship award

August 26, 2004

Each spring UNCW awards several Undergraduate Research Fellowships. Fellowship awards
consist of a partial tuition waiver in the amount of up to $1000. This competition, intended to
stimulate original research among undergraduate students, is open to any rising junior or senior
in any department or major who has completed at least one semester at UNCW.

For the 2004-2005 academic year, Mr. David Crist, an undergraduate computer science major,
received an award for his research project titled, “Real-Time Natural Speech to Synthesized
Voice Language Translation Using Open Source Applications and Frameworks”.
Dave’s proposal involves building an application that will leverage the power of a suite of
existing applications and frameworks to perform real-time, limited-vocabulary, natural-speech to
synthesized-voice, language translation. This application will recognize limited-vocabulary,
natural speech and then convert it into text. The text will then be sent to and translated by a free
language translation web service. Finally, the application will output a synthesized voice in the
new language. The completed software would be a robust language translation solution that
would be free and extensible. This particular project will focus on developing a free, open
source application intended to provide English to Spanish and Spanish to English translations.
His faculty sponsor is Dr. Sridhar Narayan.

Dave is currently pursuing degree in computer science (systems option) with a minor in
Mathematics. Dave was born and raised in Jacksonville, NC and currently resides in North
Topsail Beach, NC. He works on campus as a computer science tutor and a laboratory
teaching assistant. He expects to graduate in Fall 2005 and then plans to attend graduate
school with the eventual goal of obtaining a Ph.D in Computer Science. His research interests
include Digital Signal Processing, High Performance Computing, Visualization, Artificial
Intelligence, and Human-Computer Interaction.