Language Processing Center North
PhD students Michele Persiani and Maitreyee Tewari recently participated in the organization of The 1st PhD International Conference on Safe and Social Robotics (SSR-2018) http://www.socrates-project.eu/sesoro-2018/ in Madrid Spain. The conference was a collaboration between two H2020 Projects SECURE and SOCRATES.
On Wednesday, LPCN’s Anna Jonsson visited a group of young and fantastic women all enrolled in Teknikprogrammet at Dragonskolan. The mission was to recruit as many (future) PhD students as possible. The first step was to tell them what a PhD student is and does; the second step was to get them interested in choosing a computer science programme at the University after finishing high school. Sadly, Anna immediately scared them off by introducing formal grammars (as usual). At least the attendants got a great deal of fika for the trouble from the awsome woman (also named Anna) who organises these tech-for-girls meetings. Better luck with the recruitment next time!
LPCN member Suna Bensch blogged two weeks on the Umeå University website about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Her first blog post was about two almost opposing methodological approaches in AI, embedded into childhood memories about the autonomous car with language capabilities KITT.
Two junior members of LPCN, PhD students Adam and Anna, travelled to Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island in Canada in the middle of the summer for a vacationlike CIAA 2018. Adam made sure that they got there on time by running as a champion through Heathrow after a delayed flight. When safely at the conference, Anna presented A Comparison of Two N-Best Extraction Methods for Weighted Tree Automata (Johanna Björklund, Frank Drewes and Anna Jonsson). Moreover, both students showed great eating skills throughout the stay. Below follows a bunch of photos that hopefully prove to the concerned supervisors that their students actually went despite the heat wave.
On the 8th of June, Sara Stymne, from the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University presented her work on learning dependency parsers from heterogenous treebanks in Umeå.
We thank her warmly for a very interesting talk! Continue reading “Sara Stymne presents in Umeå”
Three LPCN members gave much appreciated presentations of their work on the 9th International Workshop Weighted Automata: Theory and Applications (WATA 2018) which was held in Leipzig (Germany), May 22–26:
LPCN members Michele Persiani and Maitreyee Tewari present their work at the 2nd SOCRATES workshop in Israel.
Suna Bensch (LPCN) and Henning Bordihn edited a special issue in the Journal of Automata, Languages and Combinatorics, dedicated to Professor Helmut Jürgensen on the occasion of his 75th birthday and in appreciation of his scientific work and his impact as teacher, mentor, and person. Among the sixteen papers in this special issue is the paper “The Output Size Problem for String-to-Tree Transducers” by Martin Berglund (LPCN), Frank Drewes (LPCN) and Brink van der Merwe.
Suna Bensch and Henrik Björklund gave presentations at the umedev IT conference 2018.
Suna Bensch was one of the keynote speakers, and gave a much appreciated presentation on dialogue systems:
Hilda and her mother recently visited our robotics lab. Hilda operated the Double robot through our corridors and met one of our Pepper robots. Hilda is interested in robots and technology, and wanted us to teach the robot more words such that it understands more and is more interactive. We are working on it until your next visit!