Public Outreach

DCU in the Community Courses

DCU in the Community is a DCU outreach centre in Ballymun a socially disadvantaged area in Dublin. The aim of the centre is to give people in Ballymun the chance to get back into Education and to give them a taste of courses one can do in university. We ran pilot summer courses in German, French, Polish Language and Culture and English for Academic Purposes. The autumn courses (September – December) were French Language and Culture and English for Academic Purposes. Stephen Doherty, who is a CNGL Ph.D. student and Sylwia Ozdowska, an NCLT Post- Doctoral researcher, taught the courses in the DCU in the Community outreach centre in Ballymun.

CNGL Public Days

CNGL have had two public days. Both events were the second day of our full bi-annual convention. On May 30th we had the CNGL Inaugural Convention. Mr. Jaap van der Meer (TAUS) gave a keynote address followed by public presentations by researchers, E&O and industry partners. At our second biannual, the CNGL Autumn 2008 meeting, on October 10th we had a keynote from Dr. Declan Groves, Traslán Translation Technology and E&O.

The CNGL Spring 2009 meeting took place in DCU on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th February. All CNGL members attended the event and many of our International Collaborators and external advisory board were in attendance. There were 30 demos and posters on show from CNGL PhD students and Post doctoral researchers on Thursday. A public meeting was held on Friday afternoon. Prof. Josef van Genabith gave an talk about localisation in every day life. This was followed by a talk by Cara Greene on some highlights from the Education and Outreach Programme. Dr. Elizabeth Shriberg (SRI International) gave a very entertaining keynote entitled, "Ten Reasons for Ignoring Prosody in Spoken Language Processing -- And Why They Are Wrong".