Soldiering on
It is a crisp, early Wednesday evening on the west side of campus. On Homewood Field, the final whistle blows on a men's soccer match. Fans stand up and cheer, then amble down to the field to congratulate a Blue Jays team that has just won its eighth straight game. The hum of casual conversation and nearby traffic fills the air as the dispersing crowd grows into a sea of smiles and hugs.
   Some 50 yards to the north, inside a utilitarian, gray-painted building, a whole other scene is taking place.
   The facility's large, wood-floored hall, quiet and empty moments before, now begins to fill with the stomping boots and clatter of more than 40 uniformed cadets, who are quickly ordered into formation. As they line up eight wide and six deep, the shuffling of feet echoes slightly before perfect quiet descends. Full story...

An 'ear' for Holocaust memoirs
Johns Hopkins engineers are developing a speech recognition system that will help historians sift through thousands of hours of interviews collected from Holocaust survivors and witnesses in languages other than English. The system is intended to be a key component of an innovative "audio search engine" that would allow historians and educators to comb easily through a vast collection of videotaped interviews to find personal accounts of specific Holocaust experiences.
   The Hopkins engineers are part of a multi-institution team that just received a $7.5 million National Science Foundation grant, to be disbursed over five years. The NSF grant was awarded to Los Angeles-based Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to fund research efforts at Johns Hopkins, IBM and the University of Maryland. Full story...

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