Congratulations are due to Andy Plummer, who has taken a post-doctoral position on a project with Professor Eric Fosler-Lussier of Computer Science and Engineering.  Andy provided me this brief description of the project:

"Our research infrastructure project seeks to provide a "kitchen" environment to promote community sharing of research techniques, foster innovative experimentation, and provide solid reference systems as a tool for education, research, and evaluation. The core of the research infrastructure is the use of virtual machines (VMs) that provide a consistent environment for experimentation. We liken the virtual machines to a "kitchen" because they provide the environmental infrastructure into which one can install "appliances" (e.g., speech recognition toolkits), "recipes" (scripts for creating state-of-the art systems using a toolkit), and "ingredients" (spoken language data)."

He'll be working on the organization of the infrastructure.

Terrific news, Andy!