<OT> Call for Proposals: JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering

[Jason Eisner]

CALL FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins
University invites research proposals for an NSF-funded Summer
Workshop on Language Engineering, to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA,
from July 6 to August 18, 2004.

The deadline for submitting proposals is October 12, 2003.

You may already have a good idea of the purpose of these six-week summer
workshops, which we have hosted every year since 1995.  Each workshop
team (eight or more people) explores a specific research topic that will
help advance the state of the art in some area of Language Engineering,
such as

* Speech recognition
* Trans-lingual information detection and extraction
* Machine translation
* Speech synthesis
* Information retrieval
* Topic detection and tracking
* Text summarization
* Question answering

The research topics explored by teams in previous workshops can serve
as good examples for your proposal (http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

Once the topics are selected, we attempt to bring the best researchers
to the workshop to work on them collaboratively.  Each topic brings
together a diverse team of leading researchers and students.  The
senior participants in the workshop are university professors and
industrial and governmental researchers from widely dispersed
locations.  The graduate students are familiar with the field and are
selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance, usually by
the senior researchers. The undergraduates, selected through a
national search, are entering seniors who are new to the field and who
have shown outstanding academic promise.

We are soliciting proposals for research projects from a wide range of
academic and government institutions, as well as from industry.  An
independent panel of experts will screen all proposals received by the
deadline for suitability to the workshop goals and format.  Results of
this screening will be announced no later than October 24, 2003.
Proposals passing this initial screening will be presented to a
peer-review panel that will meet in Baltimore on November 7 - 9, 2003.
One or two authors of the screened proposals and other leading
researchers will be invited to this meeting.  It is expected that the
proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding
concerns or new ideas.  Out of these panel reviews and ensuing
discussion, three research topics will finally be selected for the
2004 workshop.  Authors of successful proposals will typically be the
team leaders.

Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2004
Summer Workshop?  If so, we ask that you submit a one-page research
proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed and
a rough work agenda for the workshop.  If your proposal passes the
initial screening, we will invite you to join us for the
organizational meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for further
discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area of interest
is chosen as one of the three or four to be pursued next summer, we
expect you to be available for participation in the six-week workshop.
We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a
good-faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest is
chosen, you will want to have an active role in pursuing it.

Proposals may be faxed (410-516-5050), e-mailed (sec at clsp.jhu.edu) or
sent via regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles
St., Barton 320, Baltimore, MD 21218).