This is the third in a series of six-week-long research workshops on Machine Learning for Speech Language and Computer Vision Technology. These workshops bring together diverse “dream teams” of leading professionals, graduate students, and undergraduates, in a truly cooperative, intensive, and substantive effort to advance the state of the science.
These workshops constitute a continuation of the well known Johns Hopkins University summer workshops, and encompasses all areas of human language technology including automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, machine translation, topic detection and tracking, information retrieval and extraction, summarization and question answering, and certain related areas of computer vision, including image understanding and visual scene analysis. These fields share many important algorithmic and statistical approaches, allowing cross-fertilization. Machine learning challenges that arise from these areas are of fundamental scientific interest, and are shared with many other fields of science and engineering, such as medical-/bio-informatics and social network analysis.
The Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has 20 years of experience with organizing workshops of this kind. JHU will therefore act as an anchor for these workshops, but the actual host institution will rotate from year to year in order to ensure wider community ownership and engagement, and to distribute the organizational burden more widely. The 2014 workshop was hosted at Charles University in Prague, the 2015 workshop was hosted at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, will be the site of the 2016 workshop.