I've just completed making arrangements for 2 NLP related speakers to come to Duluth in September and October to give talks and visit with us. I am hoping that we might have a third and even fourth such visitor, but as yet those arrangements have not yet been confirmed.
On Weds Sept 22, Dr. Peter Wiemer-Hastings of DePaul University (Chicago, Ill) will come and talk, and then on Monday Oct 4, Dr. Jill Burstein of Educational Testing Service (Princeton, NJ) will visit and give a talk. (Both talks will take place at 3pm, during the scheduled time of the graduate nlp class.) I have never met Peter, but have long been aware of his work. He has used LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) for a variety of NLP related tasks, and has done work in automated tutoriing systems. This will be a nice opportunity for all of us to get acquainted with each other. Jill Burstein and I have known each other for a couple of years now. We met at an NSF panel in spring 2002, and then have seen each other at various conferences since then (and another NSF panel in fact). So it's about time she came to visit! She has been involved with the ETS erater product, which automatically grades student essays. You can read a rather involved summary that I gave of her invited talk at NAACL this summer in Boston here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/message/423 During these visits, I will arrange that the nlp group have a meeting with our guest. In anticipation of these visits, we'll read a bit of their prior work, and hopefully have some questions or ideas ready to discuss with them. Since I am teaching the graduate nlp class this semester, I will make sure that some of the class content relates to the topics that our visitors will discuss as well. In any case, these are usually fun visits, and we learn a lot too. If you are interested in learning more about Jill and Peter, you can find out more about them via the links provided here: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/visitors.html Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/x3XolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
