Exceptional report (as usual :-) You really have a way of telling a story, that's for sure :-)
--- Mostafa Hussein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mohammed Sameer, Alaa Abdel Fatah and I went to the Ain Shams University Ah, the ".eg dream team" :-) > I finished > preparing my slides at 4:00am the same day, woke up at 6:30am. Alaa > didn't sleep from the day before. So both of us were two cold and > constantly yawning beings. There is something about linux which makes you simply forget sleep :-) > Anyways, after the acedemic babel about how they are using statistical > spam-filtering-like tools and a couple of other hyper complicated > routines for speech recognition. Actually the 'speech recognition' part seems like something we need to look into a bit. There is another project that might be of interest to them (and us) -- the MBrola project, http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html Do please follow-up with them to see what they think and how they could help there. > Oh, after the academic babel about how they are using blah and blah. > Prof. Mohamed Yoness started his part (which is a superset of ours). Two > Arabic researches discussed how Arabic is in need to be revived to the > levels of the pre-islamic times. And that no matter what, computers will > always fail infront the greatness of the arabic language. They went on > discribing how untrained translation of any text is incest. That arabic > is an untouchable language that should be cryogenically stored > indefinitley and only tampered with by super humans (read them). Heheheheeh - did I say 'exceptional summary' yet :-) Well, there are those that believe things are holy and we should simply sit and admire 'em and there are those that up-keep the beauty and grandeur by making sure Arabic is adopted and is propelled into the future. > Anyways, my part came to demonstrate `Open Source Arabization Efforts'. > Did I say that I was criticized before I start. One of the arabic super > humans noted my presentation headline on the projector screen several > minutes before I start. Mentioning that it is a racial thing to say > Arabization and it should be Arabicization! Stating that Arabizition is > related to Arabs and Arabicization is more related to arabic. When we first started Arabeyes, I contacted a number of professors the world over in hopes of their interest and help (Ain Shams was contacted as well). Would it be worth while for me to re-dig their names so you guys can follow-up with them (they were mostly CS professors) ? > Oh, did I say > that they criticized the name Arabeyes too. Ofcourse some questions were > OK. We finally demonstarted Arabbix and distributed 11 CDs, including my > own CD :..( Heheheh - tough crowd indeed :-) But with those 11 CDs gone, I have a feeling "the dream team" did a wonderful job. Keep at it !! > At the end we urged them repeatedly to help us and/or ask us more > questions on Arabeyes.org and linux-egypt.org. I highly recommend you keep up with them (follow-ups, etc), that's one thing we are missing (among many); true linguist knowledge and some entity to overlook our work and give us some constructive criticism is critical for a professional end-result. Again, many many thanks on the effort, the hard work and sleepless night (or maybe nightS ;-). I'm sure this will lead to more awareness and more presentations - at the end you guys will be expert public speakers at a min :-) Thanks again from Arabeyes and from all its volunteers. Salam. - Nadim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
