SOCRATES THEMATIC NETWORK PROJECTS

SPEECH COMMUNICATION SCIENCES &
ADVANCED COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES

Co-operation in the framework of a 4th dissemination year
(Nov 1, 1999 - Nov 1, 2000)

Working group 5: Promotion and Facilities

Working group members:

funding	name	site	e-mail	previous WG
SCS	Gerrit Bloothooft	Utrecht - The Netherlands	Gerrit.Bloothooft@let.uu.nl	SLE/PHON
ACO	Antonio Zampolli	Pisa - Italy	glottolo@ilc.pi.cnr.it	CL
ACO	Victoria Rosén	Bergen - Norway	victoria@uib.no	NEL/CL

Promotion

This component relates to the general promotion of language and speech research and technology. For the technology part it may heavily rely on what's developed in the general ELSNET pages. The goal of this component is to answer (at least) the following questions:

what is language and speech technology / phonetics / SLT about?
what is it good for, both at the society level and the very practical level, including demos)?
why is it difficult?
why is it interesting?
where to get more information?

Two major audiences for such promotion are students (see also Student Awareness Plan, WG IV) and companies wishing to use NL&Speech technologies and therefore wishing to attract graduates as employees. These target groups may need quite different presentations.

The working group should reflect on how the JEWELS site can be made known and should make plans for presenting quality information in an attractive way. Secondly, how can we stimulate interest in the field of language
and speech in general by tailoring the presentations to the specific target groups? The latter is also the terrain of HLT Central. Demonstrations can be found at the Linglink site http://www.linglink.lu/hlt/showcase/.

Visions on future of education (by experts)

It is suggested that experts be invited to present personal views on future developments on the JEWELS site. These views could for instance be a detailed outline of an ideal curriculum in language and speech technology, or an infrastructure that could help the trainers to adequately respond to needs emerging in research and in industry (the reactive variant), or it could even be more proactive in that it would be an infrastructure that would allow us to have the right level of competence ready at the very moment when it is needed.

It is suggested that new visions be published every three months. Regular contributions could be an interesting incentive for the public to visit the JEWELS website.

Facilities for education and training

The WG should collect and provide information on additional facilities not explicitly covered by other working groups:

a dynamic searchable database for traineeships should be established, with announcements of offers and requests. A structure for this database should be outlined in terms of required fields (such as: name, contact, topic, platforms, location, expiration date of offer, etc.). Requirements for easy public entry of offers and requests into the database should be defined.
grants and scholarships (this could also be a dynamic database with public contributions)
student exchange offers
description of EU, national, regional and local support programmes, including advice as how to enter these programmes (this may need a bit more descriptive text)
guide to international infrastructures (e.g. professional organisations, thematic networks)