The initiative was started October 2007 with the meeting of students, initiative’s founders and others interested in computational linguistics, student projects and project based learning. Before this event the founders of the initiative defined a framework of the initiative, created the web page and the blog at the Ad-hoc Education Environment site and registered a company for financial operations support.
The meeting resulted in growth of the core team up to 5 members, who were involved in the mentioned below achievements.
Projects
- Joint student project with High School of Economics (St. Petersburg branch) – St. Petersburg job market of applied linguistics professionals. 75% completed.
- Student project on Voice XML. During this project students are studying Voice XML technology and working on Voice XML software development. Freezed.
- Consulting project for a company - content provider. Report on current situation with word spotting technology for telephony quality speech . Report is done.
- Organization of ‘How to Teach Computational Linguistics Effectively’ forum. The forum gathered more then 150 participants from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Ulyanovsk and Petrozavodsk. This event joined representatives of local and international companies and academic institutions involved in the field of Computational Linguistics, as well as students and alumni. The event was sponsored by Sun Microsystems.
Infrastructure
- Stand-alone initiative site http://www.mathlingvo.ru (20 visits per day) and corresponding emails
- thematic blog on applied linguistics
- logo and business cards (design by Alex Antipin)
- info handouts (Russian and English)
- Contacts within academia, students and industry
Highlights
- 3 awards for initiative’s concept and activities
- Initiative’s results and concept presented at ‘IT education in Russia’ conference in Tver, May 2007. (Participation costs covered by initiative’s budget)
- Forum ‘How to Teach Computational Linguistics Effectively’ has been announced in both IT media (PC Week/RE, CNews, SPb IT, etc.) and professional linguistics communities. The state educational portal ict.edu.ru posted the detailed info about the forum.
Perspectives
- Negotiations with an IT-company on student anti-spam lab foundation.
- Student internships support
- Further networking events (tech talks, seminars)
