Amazon's recent Prime Day was largely written off as a bust, but imagine if it had gone differently. Imagine if instead of offering you an assortment of things you had zero interest in, Amazon instead provided you with a list of things you needed, wanted — or both.
A recent article on Forbes.com, "Super-Smart Retail, Coming Soon To A Device Near You," features LTI Professor Eric Nyberg, whose startup company... Read More
"Pittsburgh seems to have become a center for automated language learning with such companies as Duolingo, Carnegie Speech, Safaba Translation Solutions and WeSpeke headquartered there. In all, twelve language-based businesses have been identified as being started in the Pittsburgh area. The probable cause? Professor Jaime Carbonell founded the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996."
So begins a recent article in Forbes,... Read More
LTI Research Professor Scott E. Fahlman may be known as the father of the emoticon, but his research legacy goes well beyond his smiley fame. A recent profile in the online publication Narratively delves into Fahlman's work in artificial intelligence research, what he's focused on now and where the future may lead.
"Throughout his career as an AI researcher Fahlman has worked toward revolutionizing... Read More
A team of researchers from the LTI and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), recently earned first place in the Action Classification Task category of the 2015 THUMOS Challenge. Held in conjunction with the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the THUMOS Challenge aims to automatically recognize a large number of human actions from open source videos in a realistic setting. LTI members participating on the CMU-UTS team included Principal Systems... Read More
LTI Research Professor Lorraine Levin has been named to the 2015-2016 class of fellows for Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering (ELATE at Drexel®). Part of the International Center for Executive Leadership in Academics within the Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership® at Drexel University College of Medicine, ELATE is a one-year part-time national leadership development program designed to advance... Read More
Carnegie Mellon Phone Service Uses Funny Recordings To Make Anti-Ebola Health Messages "Go Viral" in Guinea
Halting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is no laughing matter, but a phone information service developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers is leveraging people's interest in phone games and wacky humor to help spread urgent health information in Guinea.
The phone project, called Polly, began operating in March through the U.S. Embassy in Guinea, where the current Ebola epidemic began in December 2013 and where people are still grappling with the outbreak. This week, Polly is part of an anti-Ebola campaign in... Read More
LTI Ph.D. candidate Manaal Faruqui won a Best Student Paper award from the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics — Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2015) for his work "Retrofitting Word Vectors to Semantic Lexicons." The paper proposes a method for refining vector space representations using relational information from semantic lexicons by encouraging linked words to have similar vector representations, and it makes no... Read More
MCDS student Chengliang Lian and LTI Ph.D. candidate Rui Liu took top honors in this semester's class project competition in 11-761: Language and Statistics.
Students in the course, which aims to ground the data-driven techniques used in language technologies in sound statistical methodology, must complete a substantial team project at the end of the semester. The project requires students to discover and exploit deficiencies in the... Read More
Associate Research Professor Eduard Hovy earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp last month for his holistic approach to automatic text summarization in natural language processing. "His efforts are turning this discipline into an international research field," they said.
In discussing Hovy's nomination, University of Antwerp Professor Walter Daelemans praised the far-reaching nature of Hovy's work — which impacts everything from cancer research and treatment to... Read More
Language Technologies Institute Ph.D. student Jun Araki has received a 2015-2016 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award to support his ongoing research into event extraction and event coreference resolution.The intensely competitive IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards program honors exceptional Ph.D. students interested in solving problems that are both important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in fields like computer science and engineering, electrical and... Read More