Joohoon @ Blog :: Hooni's Adventures

I was searching for a video clip for the World Cup qualifying round between S. Korea and Saudi Arabia, and this "Translate results" feature in YouTube caught my eyes.

I have tried many software packages for translating Korean to English, but all of them had miserable translation quality. Well, let's give Google a try. After all, Google is a company filled with the best of the best computer scientists, right?

The underlined translation made me laugh so hard.  Can anyone understand what it says in English? The English translation is nothing more than what it sounds like when you read the original Korean characters.

Obviously, Google's translation doesn't have any kind of natural language processing support. It seems to me that it's trying to convert each word one by one using dictionary, without understanding what the sentence means. Even worse, the dictionary is not that big, so if it encounters a word that doesn't exist in the dictionary, well you see the results in this picture. I don't even understand why Google even bothers trying to support Korean to English translation at this level. It's a complete garbage, and it's so far the worst translation engine I've ever tried.

Not so Google-ish. It SUCKS!

- Hooni -

The Dow Jones has been dropping for 7 consecutive days now. Maybe it's time to get use to see huge drops, but I have never seen such a sharp V-shape move within few minutes of trading. When the market opened this morning, I thought of the circuit breaker immediately. The Dow dropped almost 700 points within few minutes, breaking the resistance at 8000 point. People say that today's crisis is the worst since the Great Depression, but even my parents were not born at the time. I don't really know what it was like to live through the Great Depression, but I think I am getting some hints now.

Scared,
- Hooni -

Technical Opportunities Conference - September 18, 2008

I had a chance to go back to the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA this week for the Technical Opportunities Conference. I stayed until Saturday to spend more time with my friends and took some pictures.



On the day of the TOC, the Electrical and Computer Engineering department offered the breakfast for students and the recruiters. It started at 7:45am, which I thought was a little too early for me, but I managed to get up in the morning and started walking towards the Roberts Engineering Hall where the breakfast event was held.




The room was crowded with students, faculties and recruiters from many companies. I saw many familiar faces, including Janet who was my department adviser while I was at school.


After the breakfast, we headed to the University Center where all the TOC booths were located. The students started coming around 10:00am and the event lasted until 4:00pm. This year's TOC was one of the busiest despite the fact that the economy is undergoing severe suffering. There were a lot of companies, including all the big name companies like Intel, IBM, Google, Apple along with many small companies I have never heard of. However, it was sad to see the "Lehman Brothers" booth empty. :-(






After the TOC, I went back to the Hammerschlag Hall, the home of ECE. This is the building where I spent most of my time. The 2nd floor was completely renovated, which looked really nice. The Level D always bring me back a lot of memories, like staying up all night to work on a project.





The Gates Center for Computer Science is the new building that CMU recently started constructing. As the name suggests, Bill Gates donated 20M for the school of the Computer Science back in 2003 (I am not sure the exact year). It was the same year that Tepper donated 55M to the school of Business to create the Tepper School of Business. I remember students making fun of Bill Gates for donating "ONLY 20M" when he was the richest man in the world, since 20M is not even half of what Tepper donated. ;-)



Returning to Pittsburgh always makes me excited. The four years I've spent in Pittsburgh and CMU were definitely the most precious time in my life. It's already been more than 2 years since I graduated, and most of my friends are gone, but Pittsburgh still is my home, and it always will be.

- Hooni -