You are currently browsing the daily archive for August 28th, 2007.
The 9th annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics is calling for papers. The conference will be held in Haifa, Israel from February 17-23, 2008. Two of the keynote speakers were professors of mine last semester. Alon Lavie works on machine translation (including for low-resource languages) and machine translation evaluation. Kemal Oflazer was a visiting professor here at CMU last semester and advised me for a lab project on Old English morphology. He’s one of the leading proponents of finite state technology for morphological analysis and has done a lot of work with Turkish, which has a very rich morphology.
Submission Deadline: October 15, 2007.
The full CFP is given below:
Well, Chinese internet users are getting the shaft yet again. Beijing police are going to be putting cartoon police officers on the top Chinese web portals. These nifty little guys will warn users that they shouldn’t be looking at illegal websites. Isn’t that sweet? We wouldn’t want all those minds polluted by notions of liberty, religion, or political dissention.
As a big fan of both Star Wars and the International Space Station, you would think that the upcoming marriage of the two would delight me. You would be wrong.
Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber will be flown to Houston, where it will be sent off by Chewie and a host of other minor Star Wars characters, including R2 and some stormtroopers. Then, it will be carried along with the new Italian-built Harmony node to the space station by STS-120 (Discovery) on October 23rd. At the end of the mission, it will be brought home and probably gain a few tens-of-thousands of dollars in value as a result. The reason for this gimmick is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars franchise.
I suppose the reason I hate this cheap, pointless exercise so much is that I am really angry with people not appreciating the sheer awesomeness that is the International Space Station. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that there are currently people living in space. The fact that they don’t already know it says to me that something has gone horribly wrong in our national psyche. So NASA feels the need to allow this gimmick to proceed, perhaps in hopes of increasing awareness and therefore funding. Maybe it’s not so much anger I feel as it is sorrow, for the futility I sense in trying to change the status quo with such a cheap trick.
Or maybe I’m just being way too dramatic — a charge that has oft been levelled at me. I will not deny it. Probably the LucasArts people wanted to generate some buzz for their franchise and the NASA geeks, having a high probability of being devoted Star Wars fans, accepted gladly.
Space.com: “NASA Shuttle to Launch Luke Skywalker’s Lightsaber”
Last year I worked on a project with my friend Israel Kloss called FreeAlert. The site is not-for-profit and was originally intended to help refugees entering the Washington, DC area find things they need for free. It now covers major metropolitan areas all across the United States and is intended to benefit everyone.
The idea is simple. Enter some keywords and get matching free items off of craigslist for your city sent to your cell phone. You can enter up to 5 sets of keywords and each set has exclusion terms. This makes it so that you can receive notices with the term computer but without the term desk. Israel just took the site out of private beta last week and it is currently in public beta mode.
It was an interesting project for me because it gave me the chance to work in python on some http and smtp protocol code. It also gave me the chance to work on processing xml and rss feeds. Definitely some cool stuff there and it has resulted in a spin-off that will probably be functioning fairly soon. Israel is one of those people with a lot of great ideas and he has the personality to inspire you with them. Plus he is also one of those rare people that actually care enough about the suffering of others to actually try to do something about it, which you just have to admire.
So, please, check it out and let us know how we can make it better.
