CMU talk:NICT and Natural Language Processing

Dr. Makoto Nagao, President of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
LTI seminar
Abstract:National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) is the sole national institute for the research and funding in the area of information and communications. Its vision is to realize the "universal communication" on the Earth. It has been the central research group to realize the governmental plan of "e-Japan" (2001-2005), and will keep the same position in the next five year plan of the government: "u-Japan"(2006-2010), which is a step to realize the universal communication. NICT's research activity includes wireless communication and sensing, ultra-high speed network technology, particularly optical communication technology, information security technology, and human communication technology such as natural language processing, information retrieval, human interface, virtual reality and urban information robotic system. The talk will be composed of general introduction of the above activities, and the future direction of example-based machine translation and information retrieval. About the speaker: Dr. Makoto Nagao was a professor of Kyoto University and did research works of natural language processing, image processing and digital library system. He was the originator of example-based machine translation. After serving the President of Kyoto University for six years, he has been the president of NICT since 2004. He received many awards including Japan Prize, ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, and Medal of Honor of IAMT.