Learning from digital humanities for the Siri for Maintenance project

This week Melinda talked with Dr. Beatrice Alex  who is in computational linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. I learned a lot about when and how to include subject matter experts in the NLP and semantic object identification pipeline. We can take some of the lessons she learned in their digital humanities project into our Siri for Maintenance project. Beatrice’s homepage is http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/balex/

Attaching the BlueBox to rotating machinery

Today the SHL managed to get a hold of an old and broken record player.

After disassembling the record player we discovered that the fault was a deteriorated elastic belt. We made do with what was available and replaced the belt with a piece of string. Whilst the record player was open we also replaced the wires running to the 12V DC motor with wires leading to a DC power supply unit. This allowed us to control the spin of the record player by varying the supplied voltage – the record player no longer just runs at either 33 or 45 revolutions per minute. We were then able to place a couple of BlueBoxes on the record player and get live data measuring the acceleration caused by the rotation of the disc bed.