5 December: fyi -- phd funding -- Pennsylvania/Portugal

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Ph.D. Program Carnegie Mellon | PORTUGAL in the area of Language and
Information Technologies

Deadline: December 15, 2011

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
Carnegie Mellon | Portugal 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.

The LT program involves 1 or 2 new PhD students every year. 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 assisted language learning (CALL) and speech-to-speech
machine translation (S2SMT).

The doctoral students will be involved in one of the collaborative
projects between LTI and the Portuguese Universities aimed at building
real HLT systems.

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.

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 program:

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.

Program Highlights

REAP.PT project

http://call.l2f.inesc-id.pt/reap.public/

PT-STAR project

http://pt-star.l2f.inesc-id.pt/ptstar/


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