CNGL signs Memorandum of Understanding with NICT Japan

CNGL signs Memorandum of Understanding for research collaboration with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

DCU, on behalf of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), has signed a Memorandum of Understanding for research collaboration with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies (NICT) in Tokyo.

Professor Josef van Genabith, Director of the CNGL at DCU’s School of Computing, led the CNGL delegation which included Dr. Páraic Sheridan, CNGL Operations Director, Mr. Richard Stokes, CEO of DCU INVENT and Mr. Takeshi Fukunaga head of the Global Meta Media Division of Dai Nippon Printing (DNP), an industrial partner of CNGL based in Tokyo. This Memorandum of Understanding for research collaboration with NICT is part of CNGL’s strategic objective to strengthen relationships with international partners and to develop new opportunities for research collaboration in areas underpinning Next Generation Localisation.

Prof. van Genabith said, “We are particularly pleased to sign this agreement to deepen the relationship between Ireland and Japan in the research and development of computing technologies in areas such as language, speech, and digital content personalisation which are becoming increasingly important.”

Some of the potential in these areas was demonstrated at the signing ceremony where Prof. Eiichiro Sumita, head of the Language Translation Group at NICT’s Knowledge Creating Communication Research Centre, demonstrated an iPhone application which allows people to speak tourism-related questions or answers into the phone in English and have those automatically translated into Japanese (or vice versa) and then spoken through speech synthesis from the phone. The NICT attendees also showed particular interest in details of the CNGL ‘Twanslate’ application that is currently being used to stream automatic real-time translations of online Twitter messages related to the World Cup tournament.

The strategic importance of the relationship between Ireland and Japan in these areas was further highlighted at the signing ceremony by Mr. Fukunaga of DNP who stressed the commercial potential of multilingual and personalised digital content delivery technologies and pointed to the unique industry-facing nature of CNGL and the scope of the research programme enabled by the Irish government’s investment through Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). “Dai Nippon Printing has been actively engaged in the process for commercialising research outputs of CNGL and sees great opportunity to build on Ireland’s leadership position in the localisation industry and take advantage of business opportunities with DNP and other Japanese companies seeking to adapt new media products and services from Japanese to English and European languages”, Mr. Fukunaga said.