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Visiting scientists begin work at the IBM Dublin Center for Advanced Studies
The IBM Dublin Centre for Advanced
Studies (CAS) was launched at the end of 2003 to support our aim of
moving up the value chain. A significant part of this new centre is the
appointment of visiting scientists.
A large number of academics applied for these visiting scientist
positions and hence we held a rigorous selection procedure involving
IBM assessors from both IBM Dublin Software Lab (DSL), IBM Research and Science Foundation Ireland.
The selected visiting scientists are formally beginning their
appointments on Thursday 12th February. On this day they we will be
holding a special information session in the canteen at 3:30pm. During
this information session the visiting scientists will each give a brief
introduction to the research work they intend to do. This session is
open for anyone in IBM to attend and is a great opportunity for
everyone to learn about the research planned for the Dublin CAS.
The following is a list of the CAS
visiting scientists that we decided to appoint. These visiting
scientists will be formally contracted to visit IBM one day per week to
work with IBM DSL staff on research projects.
- John Keating
of NUI Maynooth will research into ways to enable e-Learning systems to
support the remote carrying out of scientific experiments. This is an
extension of his existing work on enabling the remote use of powerful
telescopes via the internet.
- Josef Van Genabith
of Dublin City University will focus on computational linguistics. His
first project will be in the area of inducing wide coverage deep
grammars from a corpus. In addition, IBM will be taking on sponsorship
of the Dublin Computational Linguistics Seminar Series which is
currently organised by Josef.
- Nick Kushmerick
of University College Dublin will research in the area of information
extraction (IE) and information retrieval (IR). His initial focus will
be to extend some existing research prototypes by using IBM tools to
add linguistic intelligence to the algorithms. For this work he will
use a number of tools developed of IBM's Unstructured Information
Management Architecture (UIMA).
- Vinny Wade
of Trinity College Dublin will research into e-Learning systems. While
the exact area of research for Vinny has yet to be agreed, this will be
an extension of his existing e-Learning research work to support the
mission for developing Lotus' e-Learning products which was recently
moved from Westford to Dublin.
In addition we hope to appoint another
visiting scientist later in the year working in the area of software
engineering. The start of this project has been delayed for logistical
reasons; further details will be announced around the middle of the
year.
Because of the high quality of
applications received, it was decided to also appoint a number of CAS
Faculty Fellows. These faculty fellows will be given the right to visit
DSL and enter into joint research projects. However, they will not have
a formal commitment an schedule for visiting IBM.
- Alexey Lastevetsky
of University College Dublin will research into new ways of programming
grid enabled applications. He is already the supervisor for Eugene
Konstantinov from DSL who is studying part time for a Ph.D. degree in
UCD.
- Andy Way of Dublin City University will focus on Machine Translation systems. Nano Gough, one of his students, is currently in receipt of an IBM Fellowship Award.
- Julie Bernsden of University College Dublin will focus on speech recognition systems as an extension of her SFI funded work on Multilingual Ubiquitous Speech Technology: Enhanced and Rethought (MUSTER).
It is anticipated that a number of CAS
students will be funded to work on these projects. In general these
student projects will not start until the next academic year (i.e.
September/October 2004).
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