Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Drupal Camp 20th - 21st November 2010

The next Drupal Ireland event is taking place on Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st November in Trinity College Dublin and will run from 9am to 5pm both days. Registration is free and you can now sign-up for this event at http://www.drupalcampireland.org.

Presentations in two tracks: White belt and black belt
The event will include presentations from experienced Drupal developers where people can learn more about Drupal, what it can do and how it can benefit both them, their careers and their organisation. There will be two tracks, so participants of all levels will be catered for.

- White Belt track: For newcomers and beginners.
- Black Belt track: For intermediates and experts.

About Drupal
Drupal is a powerful open source content management system which allows users to easily publish, manage and share a wide variety of content on the internet. There is a great demand for people who know this software and demand is growing. Drupal's many features and add-ons allow it to be used for a variety of website needs; including for marketing, internal communications, informational websites, and for social networking purposes. See http://www.drupal.org

About the Irish Drupal user group
This event is being organised by the Drupal Ireland user group - a volunteer membership group. The group is comprised of developers who use Drupal everyday; who contribute to Drupal core, documentation and maintain popular modules.

Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, this event is being held free of charge. Lunch is also being provided, and while registration is free, we would ask people to register before hand so we can cater accordingly.

More information on the event, including accommodation and car pooling, can be found at http://drupalcampireland.org

Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar

The second of this year's talks in the Dublin Computational
Linguistics Research Seminar DCLRS series will by given this week by
Dr. Ielka van der Sluis of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation
at Trinity College Dublin.

This year the DCLRS series is being organized by the Artificial
Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC) in DIT, and is generously
supported by the CNGL and the DIT School of Computing.

The talk will take place in KE 308 in Kevin Street @ 16.00. Tea and biscuits
to be provided!




--- Speaker:
Dr. Ielka van der Sluis. Centre for Next Generation Localisation,
Trinity College Dublin.

--- Title:
Cross-Cultural Assessment of Automatically Generated Multimodal
Referring Expressions in a Virtual World.

--- Abstract
This talk presents a cross-cultural evaluation of an algorithm for
generating multimodal referring expressions to be produced by embodied
conversational agents in a virtual world. The algorithm employs a cost
function to implement general principles of
human motor control and cooperativity in dialogues that can be
parametrised so as to vary the precision of the pointing gestures and
the amount of linguistic information included in the referring
expressions. The study evaluated how native speakers of English and
Japanese perceived three different algorithmic outputs for multimodal
referring behaviour. Results show differences between English- and
Japanese-speaking subjects with respect to their preferences for types
of multimodal referring expressions. In the talk these differences are
related to matters of understandability, human-likeness and
culture-specific social practices. Methodological issues arising from
the translation and localisation of the materials used in the study as
well as its background and preparations are also addressed.

This research is supported by the Science Foundation Ireland (Grant
07/CE/I1142) as part of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation
(www.cngl.ie) at Trinity College Dublin.

KEYWORDS: generating referring expressions, multimodality, virtual
worlds, realisation of referring expressions, dialogue, translation,
cross-cultural differences, social practices.


--- Time and Location:
KE308, Kevin Street @ 16.00, Friday 29th of October

Friday, October 22, 2010

Late Registration

You need to register and pay before Friday October 29th
to avoid a late fee.
If you have had problems with acceptance of an offer please
contact me (deirdre.lawless@dit.ie) asap
http://www.dit.ie/registration/

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

DIT Security Awareness Week

Security Awareness week is on next week from 18th to 22nd
Information Security awareness week is open to all students and staff and will provide an overview of why information security matters to all of us and what we need to do to protect ourselves from identity theft and other IT threats. Awareness seminars will take place in venues across DIT and will provide:

Simple tips on how to protect yourself at college and at home
Data protection - the legal implications for a data breach
Information on how staff can get their DIT laptops encrypted
Details on how obsolete DIT laptops can support development work in Malawi through Laptops4africa@dit.ie.

Further details available at
http://www.dit.ie/services/is/staff/itcompliance/infosecweek/