BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Big Data\, language technology\, and the future of 2000 languages 
 you’ve never heard of (but a billion Africans speak every day)
DTSTART:20131128T120000
DTEND:20131128T130000
DTSTAMP:20260916T055649Z
UID:cf37a8f652f1b7b446da411014380c6c566f0d84325be8fe24f4fde3
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Martin Benjamin\, Director\, Kamusi Project and Senior Scienti
 st\, EPFL\nAFROTECH LECTURE - EPFL's new future Africa initiative present
 s\nWill Big Data cause the extinction of African languages? Or will new la
 nguage technology help African languages to thrive in a polyglot age? The 
 Kamusi Project was one of the earliest online dictionaries.\nThis collabor
 ative effort for the Swahili language is now one of the most-used resource
 s for any African language\, and is transforming into a powerful multiling
 ual lexical resource for languages worldwide. Martin Benjamin will show ho
 w linguistic crowd sourcing and other advances at the nexus of language an
 d technology make it possible to document every word in every language and
  make it available for all.\nBIO: Martin Benjamin leads the Kamusi Project
 \, a Swiss-based non-profit organization focused on language development t
 hroughout Africa and beyond. He recently joined EPFL's Distributed Informa
 tion Systems Lab as a senior scientist to pursue the informatics potential
  of massive multilingual data. Benjamin guided localization of Microsoft W
 indows in Swahili and developed ICT terminology and resources for dozens o
 f other African languages. He used his experience to re-engineer the dicti
 onary\, enabling a level of detail never before seen. He trained at Columb
 ia and Yale as an anthropologist and lived in Tanzania for three years.\nW
 EBSITES: afrotech.epfl.ch\nSandwiches and drinks will be provided at the 
 end of the lecture.            
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR