Weekly summary, Jan 18-24 2024

This week, I have been mostly concentrating on “Simple C-LARA”. I posted an initial report here. Since then, Claudia and Lucretia have already used it in an initial session at the Romanian school in Holland! Claudia provided a lot of useful feedback and things are moving along well. I have just checked in an enhancement she suggested which allows you to add a title page to a C-LARA text; here is an initial example.

I am now implementing another enhancement which will keep track of dependencies between project phases, so that Simple C-LARA will only need to recompile the necessary parts when you tell it to create the multimedia text. I should have this working soon.

ComputEL-7 paper, Drehu alphabet book

Our paper about Drehu was accepted for ComputEL-7. The work was still rather incomplete when we submitted it – Pauline, Fabrice and I are filling in the gaps, so that the final version can look more respectable.

First up: the Drehu alphabet book is now complete, and IMHO is rather cool. I posted a review on Goodreads to make it more visible. We have other things planned.

Second progress report

We should start talking more concretely about how we’ll produce the upcoming second C-LARA progress report, tentatively pencilled in for late Feb. Some obvious topics:

Enhancements to C-LARA since the first progress report.
Evaluating C-LARA’s performance. At a minimum, we can include the material from the ALTA paper. If possible, we should repeat the experiments with the latest model, so we can track the improvement.
“ChatGPT-4 as a software engineer”. We can offer a lot more detail about which tasks the AI does well at, which less well. E.g. it did almost everything for installing C-LARA on the UniSA server and adding the new social network extensions. Conversely, most of “simple C-LARA” has been developed by me. In the middle, there are many tasks where we have shared the work more or less equally.
Initial user experiences. Hopefully Claudia and Lucretia’s work at the Romanian school, and maybe feedback on the Drehu resources.

Next Zoom call

Thu Jan 25, 2023, 20:00 Adelaide (= 09.30 Iceland = 09.30 Ireland/Faroe Islands = 10.30 Europe = 11.30 Israel = 13.00 Iran = 17.30 China = 20:30 Melbourne/New Caledonia)