The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yonatan Bisk, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and member of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The Idea Language learning requires physically existing in the world (not being just a brain in a jar). A child doesn’t learn language from reading Wikipedia.  They build rich models of the world by seeing and doing.  They understand other humans as socially intelligent and cooperative agents with whom to speak and from whom to learn.  Yet, natural language “understanding” systems have focused on training in an impoverished disembodied text-only setting — trying to download as much text off the internet and […]

Rastislav Bodik (University of Washington) and Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown University) have announced an exciting, new opportunity for junior researchers – either young faculty or older graduate students – to apply to attend and speak at the Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL) 2017. SNAPL is a biennial conference for discussions on innovation in programming languages, from foundations to applications and across industry and academia. SNAPL seeks paper submissions from researchers and practitioners on programming language topics that will generate a good discussion amongst attendees. Bodik and Krishnamurthi plan to bring in less established researchers to generate discussions from different perspectives and provide an opportunity for junior researchers to share their […]