Centre Events

Second CNGL 101 Day at UCD

The secong CNGL 101 Day is being held at University College Dublin (UCD) on Wednesday 10th March 2010. The topics covered will be Speech Technology by Prof. Julie Berndsen, Cross-lingual IR by Dr. Gareth Jones and Workflow by Dr. Lamine Aouad. We will also have an interactive session on the new CNGL Web Portal.

101 session at DCU

74 Second Level Students qualify for CNGL AILO Final

74 students from 17 schools across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have qualified for the final of the CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad. CNGL has assigned a tutor (researchers in CNGL) to each school. The tutor will visit the school to provide training on how to tackle the kind of linguistics problems they will face in the final in DCU on March 24th. Good luck to all the participants and have fun!

A team at AILO 2009

CNGL runs 101 sessions

CNGL is holding the first 101 session on Tuesday 16th February 2010. The first session is being held at DCU given by the area chairs and focusing on core aspects of ILT, LOC, DCM and SF. The format is 1 hour overview (accessible, basic principles) followed by 30 minutes discussion each. The first day is presented by the area chairs, later by PIs, postdocs, industry partners etc.

The 101's are an important tool to develop project cohesion, cross CSET communication and esprit de corps. These 101s will form a foundation for further collaboration and joint research.

CSET Commercialisation Forum (CCF)

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) hosted the CSET Commercialisation Forum (CCF) at DCU recently. Representatives from all ten SFI-funded CSETS attended the meeting.

The 4th MT Marathon at CNGL

The National Centre for Language Technology and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation hosted the Machine Translation Marathon (MTM) 2010 at Dublin City University 25-30th January on behalf of the EuroMatrixPlus Consortium, a Machine Translation research project. It was the fourth in a series of MT Marathons in which researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation from all over the world attend lectures and labs introducing them to the latest research in the field.

Over 100 people from more than 20 countries attended the event, representing industrial, academic and governmental organisations.

The morning sessions were made up of experts giving introductory lectures on a variety of MT topics followed by presentations of open-source tools from researchers in the field.

In the afternoon, students got an opportunity to work on lab exercises, while more experienced researchers worked together on open-source projects.

Thanks to Ventsislav Zhechev and Eithne McCann for all their hard work.

Students in a lab session at the MT Marathon

Fore more information on the MT Marathon see http://MTMarathon2010.info

An Tanaiste reaffirms Government's commitment to R&D Investment

The most effective case for continued investment in science and research is where it is linked directly to specific commercial initiatives for the creation of companies, jobs and the attraction of further investment according to An Tanaiste Mary Coughlan T.D. speaking at a joint CSET event on .

The ten centres - nine SFI-funded Centres of Science Engineering and Technology (CSETs) and Cork's Tyndall Institute - hosted the event in the Science Gallery in TCD.

The CSETs and Tyndall combined have 82 industry partners including major international corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, HP, Intel, Dell, Xilinx, Analog Devices and GSK who collectively have invested over EUR 70m in those research programmes. This is on top of approx EUR 1.5bn of investment by those companies in Ireland where they are supporting up to 50,000 jobs.

Among the initiatives unveiled was the CSETs Commercialisation Forum (CFC) to share best practice on commercialisation between the CSETs to provide improved value to Ireland for the translation of research work into commercial reality.

Prof. Brian MacCraith, Director of the Biomedical Diagnostic Institute (BDI) a CSET based at Dublin City University, acknowledged the critical responsibility of the CSETs in making Irish universities attractive internationally as homes for the best researchers: "There has been a great surge in what Irish universities are doing and the opportunity afforded to them. We are very conscious of our responsibility to deliver a jobs based dividend in return and to engage with industry to make that happen. The joint commercialisation forum launched today is a very significant step as it fast tracks learning and capability in a way that would evolve much more slowly were individual institutions to be operating alone or only in their own interests".

Speaking on behalf of industry partners in research, Robert McCarthy, Manager, Innovative Environmental Solutions at IBM said: "Recent events in the world economy have shown that the imperative to become smarter is now greater than ever. This year's Global Location Trends report by IBM Global Business Services shows that global investment activity continues to widen, along with the potential for new growth and prosperity. Ireland experienced significant absolute and relative gains in inbound investment as a result of the country's strengths in services and R&D, which is reflected in the country being the top global destination when taking account of population size".

An Tanaiste, Mary Coughlan, talked about the benefit of effective R&D investment is new companies and jobs. She reaffirmed the government's committment to investing in R&D to support Ireland Knowledge Economy. An Tanaiste stressed the importance of research centres and industry working together: "The focus on collaboration with industry is critical to deriving value from our investment in research".

EBMT Workshop

CNGL hosted the 3rd Workshop on Example-Based Machine Translation in DCU 12-13th November 2009. There was an invited talk from Sadao Kurohashi entitled "Fully Syntactic Example-based Machine Translation". Prof. Mikel Forcada and Prof. Andy Way organised the event. A report on the workshop can be found here.

Sadao Kurohashi giving the keynote at the EMBT workshop in DCU

Localisation Innovation Showcase

In conjunction with Innovation Dublin, CNGL hosted a 'Localisation Innovation Showcase' event at DCU on Friday October 16th. The CNGL showcase highlighted localisation business and technology innovation through exhibitions and demonstrations of products, technologies and projects across both industrial and academic partners of the SFI-funded CNGL centre.
--> Find out more.

Demos and Posters at the CNGL Localisation Innovation Showcase

Action week for Global Information Sharing (AGIS) 2009

AGIS '09 - Promoting Equality through Language and Cultural Diversity - took place in the University of Limerick (UL), Ireland 21 - 23 September 2009. The Action week for Global Information Sharing brought together hundreds of volunteer translators, localisation specialists and NGOs from all over the world to address the plague of global information poverty.

The Rosetta Foundation was launched at AGIs '09. The Rosetta Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation (charity) registered in Ireland. It is a spin-off from the University of Limerick's Localisation Research Centre and CNGL. The Rosetta Foundation supports the not-for-profit activities of the localisation and translation communities through the development and deployment of an intelligent translation and localisation platform.

The 14th Internationalisation and Localisation Conference organised by the the LRC, took place on 24-25 September 2009 at the Clarion Hotel, in Limerick City, Ireland. The theme of this year's conference was Localisation in The Cloud and the conference looked at the application of cloud based computing and software as a service concepts to the software localisation industry.

CNGL CTYI Courses

From July 13-17 2009, CNGL ran two combined modules with CTYI; 'Japanese Language' and 'Culturally Localising Web Pages'. A group of forty students, aged 8-13 years old, took the two modules. Joss Moorkens, a CNGL PhD student based in DCU, taught the language module. Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou, a CNGL postdoctoral researcher at the University of Limerick (UL), and Naoto Nishio, a CNGL PhD student at UL, taught the culturally localising web pages. The Culturally Localising Web Pages course is designed to introduce the concept of localisation to the participants by comparing fun Japanese, English and French web sites. This course highlights the differences and similarities of contents among those languages and cultures to explain the importance of localisation. This students learnt the Katakana character set in Japanese and were able to type them when they created their own website.

A CNGL PhD student, Robert Smith, ran a "Computers and Animation" course with the Centre for Talented Youth (CTYI) in DCU. Forty children, aged 8-13 years old, attended the course last week in DCU (July 6th-July 10th).