The thesis described the Sphinx speech to text system. It ran, if I remember correctly, on a few VAX minicomputers.
In the early part of my career (first 20 years) I concentrated on tackling very difficult problems wherever I worked, accepting some failures and some successes. Reading his thesis was important to me because it gave me a feeling for trying to solve hard problems in a low resource environment (although I did have a Lisp Machine, access to a Connection Machine and a Butterfly Machine - so not terribly resource poor!)
For what it’s worth: I am in my 70s, still waste deep in AI tech, and I still look for a few people to follow to get inspired.
