[change] UW Change Seminar Tuesday, Jan 8: Dominic Widdows, Southeast Asia, NLP, and Grab

[Philip Garrison]

Please join us Tuesday at noon in *CSE 203* for the first Change talk of
the quarter with Dominic Widdows of Grab.

*Who:* Dominic Widdows
*What:* Southeast Asia, NLP, and Grab
*When:* Tuesday, Jan 8, 12-1pm
*Where:* CSE 203

*Abstract*
Grab has become the leading transportation company, and increasingly
technology platform, throughout Southeast Asia. We have unique challenges
and opportunities with language understanding and interfaces. Grab needs to
support a bigger range of languages than any of the comparable ridehailing
companies, and Southeast Asian languages are much less well-resourced than
other world languages that have far fewer speakers. At the same time, we
have large amounts of text through reviews, customer service, and chat, and
some of the unsupervised learning techniques currently at the forefront of
Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence are well-placed to
make use of these texts to enhance our language understanding capabilities.
Long-term dreams include a seamless way to interact with Grab’s products as
if you’re talking to a very knowledgeable concierge. Interim steps include
understanding customer service inquiries, translation, and various kinds of
sentiment analysis. This talk will be a very brief introduction to the
language landscape, NLP techniques, and how we can use them.

*About the speaker*
>From a background in differential geometry, Dominic started work in NLP in
2001, developing vector space models for language representation and
reasoning back when this was still an esoteric and obscure avenue of
research. He’s best known in this field for the book Geometry and Meaning,
the use of quantum logic to represent search queries and word meanings, and
the SemanticVectors package, which has been building word embedding models
since 2007 and is freely available on GitHub for anyone to play with. He’s
worked on NLP, machine learning, information extraction, and transportation
logistics at Google and Microsoft, before joining Grab in 2016, hoping to
contribute in some of the world’s most exciting and challenging places
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[change] Fwd: CFP: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) --- July 3 – 5, 2019 --- Accra, Ghana

[Kurtis Heimerl]

-- Forwarded message -
From: Jay Chen 
Date: Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 9:22 AM
Subject: CFP: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
(COMPASS) --- July 3 – 5, 2019 --- Accra, Ghana
To: Undisclosed recipients 


***Apologies for cross-posting***

Computing and Sustainable Societies 2019
Accra, Ghana | July 3 – 5, 2019

https://acmcompass.org/


The second annual ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable
Societies (COMPASS 2019) invites submissions for the conference to be
hosted at Accra, Ghana, July 3 – 5, 2019.  COMPASS began as ACM DEV, which
was held annually between 2010 and 2016.


The COMPASS conference, now in its second year, aims to advance the
state-of-the-art in developing sustainable technologies for regions around
the world. Researchers at the conference have broad technical expertise,
spanning artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, networking,
systems, speech and language processing, computer security, data mining,
and computer vision. They seek to apply this expertise to diverse problems
in sustainable development, spanning health, accessibility, education,
agriculture, financial services, and governance.
Call for Papers

The second annual ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable
Societies (COMPASS 2019) invites submissions for the conference. The program
 from last year showcases the types of
topics typically relevant to the conference. COMPASS broadly includes
papers from four general “areas”: Systems, HCI, Data Science/AI, and
Deployment Experiences.


*Systems: *The Systems area focuses on computational innovations. Relevant
topics may include networking; data collection toolkits;

*HCI: *The HCI area focuses on socio-technical systems. Relevant topics may
include gender equity; social forces influencing wireless network access;
the landlord/tenant information economy;

*Data Science/AI: *The Data Science/AI area focuses on analysis, collection
of large scale data sets as well as models and algorithms for developing
and studying AI based systems. AI applications not deployed are also
considered in this area.

*Deployment Experiences: *The Deployment Experiences area focuses on
reporting experiences with field deployments or results from long-term
studies that can provide valuable insights into how our tools perform (or
fail) in real-world applications.
Tracks

COMPASS 2019 will have two tracks. To help facilitate global
representativeness, COMPASS provides mentoring to support potential authors
who need guidance in creating these papers.

The* Papers* track will represent archival journal-type submissions, with a
length of between 4 to 10 pages plus references. Papers submitted to this
track should represent polished, significant contributions. Authors are
encouraged to submit a paper of length proportional to its contribution.

In addition, COMPASS 2019 will have a *Posters *track for preliminary
projects or late-breaking results. Posters will not be archival and are
intended to allow presenters to share their latest results or get early
feedback on projects. Poster submissions will be limited to 2 pages plus
references. There are two poster submission deadlines (March 15 and May 15)
to allow for earlier travel planning as well as late-breaking work.
Important dates

Feb 1, 2019: Requests for mentorship due

March 15, 2019: Submission of Papers and Posters (first round) due

April 1, 2019: Notification of Posters (first round) acceptances

May 1, 2019:  Notification of decisions for Papers

May 15, 2019:  Submission of Posters (second round) due

May 30, 2019: Notification of Posters (second round) acceptances

June 15, 2019:  Camera-ready of Papers due

All submission are due 11:59 pm UTC.
General Conference Chair

Richard Anderson, University of Washington
Program Chairs

Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington
Carla Gomes, Cornell University
Jay Chen, NYU Abu Dhabi
Local Arrangement Chairs

Ayorkor Korsah, Angela Ansah, and Nathan Amanquah, Asheshi University


*CSG Steering Committee*


Richard Anderson, University of Washington

Nicola Dell, Cornell Tech

Melissa Densmore, University of Cape Town

Carla Gomes, Cornell University

Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington

Aaditeshwar Seth, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Lakshmi Subramanian, New York University

Miland Tambe, University of Southern California

Bill Thies, Microsoft Research New England

Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech


*Program Committee*

TBA




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