Morpheus : I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it. -- The Matrix (1999)

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About Myself

Hi, my name is Zhang Le (张 乐). Currently I'm a second year PhD student at the Centre for Speech Technology Research of the University of Edinburgh. As its name suggests, people in CSTR do many interesting researches in speech processing, and my research at CSTR focuses on New Acoustic Models, with Steve Renals being my supervisor, and Miles Osborne as my second supervisor.

My current research interests include Acoustic Modelling with Trajectory Models, Statistical Language Modeling, and Machine Learning with log-linear models.

The Past

Before coming to Edinburgh, I spent a happy time at the Natural Language Processing Lab of the Northeastern University in China, as a MSc student in Computer Science. Before that, I got a bachelor degree from the department of Computer Science of the same university, major in Manager Information System. Furthermore, if you're interested in Computational Linguistics, here's a page summarising my past research on Natural Language Processing. And my old homepage is here.

My Hobbies

As a truly computer enthusiast, I am interested in most aspects of Computer Science.

I am a Free Programmer (a programmer writing freeware for free OS in his free time with free tools). In my spare time, I like writing programs. Some of them can make people's life in cyberspace easier, some are just written for fun. They can be found on my software page. I used to work on a Linux box and now I spend more time on FreeBSD and NetBSD. Both are great free OSs. I choose BSD because it is smaller than most Linux distributions and requires less CPU power to run (and generally faster).

I use to be a C++ fan but now I'm switching (back?) to C. C++ is such a complex language that it tends to make simple things complicated and complex ones a mess. Hopefully I finally realize this.

My primary scripting language is Python. Python has the reputation of doing small job in the right way while C/C++ is the reasonable choice for larger project. My favorite text editor is vim, a very powerful, high quality text editor. You can find more of vim on my vim page. Of course, this page was edited in vim;-)