The Language Grid: Service-Oriented Collective Intelligence for Language Resource Interoperability

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                        Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Human Language Technology Center
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Speaker:	Professor Toru Ishida
		Department of Social Informatics
		Kyoto University

Title:		"The Language Grid: Service-Oriented Collective
		 Intelligence  for Language Resource Interoperability"

Date:		Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Time:		10:30am

Venue:		Room 3412 (via lifts 17/18), HKUST

Abstract:

Since multiple languages are used in various communities in daily life,
tools that can effectively support multilingual communication should be
provided. However, we often observe that the success of a multilingual
tool in one situation does not guarantee its success in another.

To develop a customized multilingual environment for various situations in
various communities, we have proposed the Language Grid; it allows users
to freely combine existing language services to develop new services for
their own. To make various language services accessible, however, we need
collaboration of universities and research institutes worldwide to share
language resources (dictionaries, parallel texts, part-of-speech taggers,
machine translators, etc.). Therefore, the Language Grid has been designed
as service-oriented collective intelligence to bridge service providers,
service users and service grid operators.

In 2006, I began the Language Grid project. Basic software for the
Language Grid has been studied and developed at the National Institute of
Information and Communications Technology (NICT). For trial operation,
Department of Social Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto
University takes on the role as the Language Grid Operator. So far, 138
groups from 16 countries join the Language Grid to share more than 120
language services.


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Biography:

I have been a professor of Kyoto University since 1993. I gained my
B.Eng., and M.Eng. Degrees from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1976,
1978, and subsequently became a research scientist at NTT Laboratories,
where I was engaged in research and development of software engineering
and knowledge processing until 1993. In 1989, I received my PhD in
engineering degree from Kyoto University.

My academic paths include visiting scientist/professor positions at
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, Institut fuer
Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Le Laboratoire
d'Informatique de Paris 6, Pierre et Marie Curie,Institute for Advanced
Computer Studies, University of Maryland,Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
and Computer Science and Technology Department, Tsinghua University. I was
appointed as a research professor at NTT Communication Science
Laboratories, and a project leader at the National Institute of
Information and Communications Technology (NICT). I am a fellow of IEEE,
IPSJ, and IEICE since 2002, 2005, and 2008. I am acting President of IEICE
Information and Systems Society (IEICE-ISS: more than 10000 members), a
research supervisor of JST PRESTO Information Environments and Humans
(more than 40 young and excellent professors selected from more than 300
candidates), and a board member of Web Science Research Initiative.

My research interest lies with autonomous agents and multiagent systems
and I have been working on this theme for more than twenty years. I am a
founder and a coordinator of MACC/JAWS (Japanese), PRIMA (Asia/Pacific)
and ICMAS/AAMAS (International), conferences on autonomous agents and
multiagent systems. I served as a program co-chair of the second ICMAS, a
chair of the first PRIMA, and a general co-chair of the first AAMAS. I
was also an editor-in-chief of Journal on Web Semantics (Elsevier) and an
associate editor of IEEE PAMI, and Journal on Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems (Springer). I also started International Workshop on
Digital Cities, ACM Conference on Intercultural Collaboration, and
International Conference on Culture and Computing.