HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Department of Computer Science Colloquium
2011 Series

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

Prof. Toru Ishida
Department of Social Informatics
Kyoto University

Date: June 14, 2011 (Tuesday)
Time: 2:30 - 3:30 pm
Venue: SCT909, Cha Chi Ming Science Tower, Ho Sin Hang Campus

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.

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.

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http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=179&lang=tc
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