2 December: fyi -- phd funding, Pennsylvania & Portugal
Index of December 2009 | Index of year: 2009 | Full index
Ph.D. Program Carnegie Mellon-PORTUGAL
in the area of Language and Information Technologies
The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University offers a dual degree Ph.D. Program
in Language and Information Technologies in cooperation with Portuguese
Universities. This Ph.D. program is part of the Portugal-Carnegie Mellon
Partnership.
The Language Technologies Institute, a world leader in the areas of
speech processing, language processing, information retrieval, machine
translation, machine learning, and bio-informatics, has been formed 20
years ago. The breadth of language technologies expertise at LTI enables
new research in combinations of the core subjects, for example, in
speech-to-speech translation, spoken dialog systems, language-based
tutoring systems, and question/answering systems.
The Portuguese consortium of Universities includes (but is not limited
to) the Spoken Language Systems Lab (L2F) of INESC-ID Lisbon/IST, the
University of Lisbon (FLUL), the University of Beira Interior (UBI) and
the University of Algarve (UALG). These Universities share expertise in
the same language technologies as LTI, although with a strong focus on
processing the Portuguese language.
Each Ph.D. student will receive a dual degree from LTI and the selected
Portuguese University, being co-supervised by one advisor from each
institute, and spending approximately half of the 5-year doctoral
program at each institute. The academic part will be done during the
first 2 years, including a maximum of 8 courses, with a proper balance
of focus areas (Linguistic, Computer Science, Statistical/Learning, Task
Orientation). The remaining 3 years of the doctoral program will be
dedicated to research.
The thesis topic will be in one of the research areas of the cooperation
program, defined by the two advisors. Two multilingual topics have been
identified as primary research areas (although other areas of human
language technologies may be also contemplated): computer aided language
learning (CALL) and speech-to-speech machine translation (S2SMT). The
doctoral students will be involved in one of these two projects aimed at
building real HLT systems. These projects will involve at least two
languages, one of them being Portuguese, the target language for the
CALL system to be developed and either the source or target language (or
both) for the S2SMT system. These two projects provide a focus for the
proposed research; through them the collaboration will explore the main
core areas in language technology.
The scholarship will be funded by the Foundation for Science and
Technology (FCT), Portugal.
How to Apply
The application deadline for the LT Ph.D. program in the scope of the
CMU-Portugal partnership is December 15, 2009.
Students interested in the dual doctoral program must apply by filling
the corresponding form at the LTI webpage.
For more information about the joint degree doctoral program in LT, send
email to the coordinators of the Portuguese consortium and of the LTI
admissions:
Isabel.Trancoso at inesc-id dot pt
LTI_Portugal_Admissions at cs dot cmu dot edu
The applications will be screened by a joint committee formed by
representatives of LTI and of the Portuguese Universities. The
candidates should indicate their scores in GRE and TOEFL tests.
Despite the particular focus on the Portuguese language, applications
are not in any way restricted to native or non-native speakers of
Portuguese.
Post-Doc positions are also available in the scope of the same program.
For additional information on these positions, contact Isabel.Trancoso
at inesc-id dot pt.
Index of December 2009 | Index of year: 2009 | Full index