Whpearson recently mentioned that people in some other online communities frequently ask "what are you working on?". I personally love asking and answering this question. I made sure to ask it at the Seattle meetup. However, I don't often see it asked here in the comments, so I will ask it:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines
- Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread.
- Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
- Talk about your goals for the project.
- Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
- Link to your work if it's linkable
I am working on an open translation memory web service. Instead of writing my thesis.
Our system takes a document and its translation, and it gives back a set of sentences, each together with its translation. Users can upload such document pairs, and other users can then search the resulting corpus for words and phrases in either of the two languages.
The core of the system is my hunalign sentence aligner algorithm. But the core is not that important actually. The trickiest parts of the system are all trivial from an algorithmic perspective (document processing, interfacing with 3rd party libraries, etc).
Why am I doing this? Because I feel that this is a useful service. I have some ideas about how to monetize it, but I will not be disappointed if these don't work out. Also, this work is more fun than writing a thesis. (My thesis is already at the phase where no new algorithms and experiments are needed, it really is just writing, but a huge amount of it.)