Academics at the University of Ulster's Magee campus (Northern Ireland) had an opportunity to get a first-hand account of the challenges involved in 'machine translation' (MT) from one of world's leading experts in the field, Professor Katsuyuki Shibata from Japan.
Professor Shibata, Professor of Mathematics and Information Science at Fukuoka University, began his MT research in 1986. His MT system translates English text into
Japanese and vice-versa in real-time and his universal MT engine can be used for all languages.
Professor Paul Mc Kevitt, who is Professor of Digital Multimedia and a member of the Computer Science Research Institute said: "It was a great honour to have Professor Shibata lecture here. Machine
translation is an interdisciplinary field involving theories and algorithms from Arts and Computing. It is one of the Holy Grail applications of Artificial Intelligence."
The
festival programme included an international line-up of talents and minds from the worlds of art, design, new media and
software development, making it an ideal showcase event in the lead-in to Londonderry becoming the first ever UK City of Culture in 2013.
