January 20, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Phil Sneiderman
Office: (443) 287-9960; Cell: (410) 299-7462
prs@jhu.edu
WHEN: 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Jan. 21. NOTE: Best times to view the student teams working on the linguistics puzzles are between 11 a.m. and 11:50 a.m. Prizes will be given out between 11:50 and noon.
WHERE: The Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins, located in the Stieff Silver building in Baltimore, at 810 Wyman Park Drive. (Directions: http://web.jhu.edu/HLTCOE/contact.html.)
WHO: Fifteen high school and middle school students from the Baltimore area will participate in a Computational Linguistics Workshop hosted by the Center for Language and Speech Processing. During the workshop, students will compete in teams, generally made up of three to five young people, but they will compete as individuals in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), which begins next month. (A complete list of participating schools is posted below.) Graduate students from Johns Hopkins’ Computational Linguistics program will lead the workshop and give prizes to the best team. More details are at: http://clsp.jhu.edu/NACLO.
WHAT: Computational linguistics is the science of understanding human language using logic, computer algorithms and math. Computational linguistics techniques are employed whenever a person uses Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and many other websites and applications.
Middle and high school students interested in language, psychology, math or computer science will learn about the computational linguistics field.
The first round of the Olympiad competition is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 2. Students who make it to the second round will compete on Tuesday, March 13. NACLO will then select the U.S. team for the International Linguistics Olympiad to be held this summer.
WHY: The event is being hosted by the Center for Language and Speech Processing, with support from the Center for Educational Outreach at Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering. The center’s mission is to encourage more middle school and high school students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math education and careers.
CONTACT FOR THE EVENT: Olivia Buzek 301-910-3046. She can be reached at this number on the day of the event.
More information about the competition can be found at this Web site:
Participating Baltimore Area Schools
(Some schools will send more than one team.)
Middle schools:
Barclay Elementary Middle School
High schools:
C. Milton Wright High School
Roland Park Country School
New Town High School
Parkville High School
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