AMTA 2020 | Announcing Conference Keynote Speakers
We are pleased to announce that the following machine translation experts from the research, commercial, and government sectors will be giving keynote presentations at the conference:
Research Keynote Speakers
Colin Cherry – Google Research
Colin Cherry is a Research Scientist at Google Translate in Montreal. Previously, he was a Senior Research Officer at Canada’s National Research Council. His primary research area is machine translation, but he has also been known to venture into parsing, morphology and information extraction. He is currently chair of the executive board of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), an action editor at the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), and recently served as research track chair for the meeting of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA 2018).
Title: Simultaneous Machine Translation: Challenges and Opportunities
Mona Diab – George Washington University
Mona Diab conducts research in Statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a rapidly growing, exciting field of research in artificial intelligence and computer science. Interdisciplinarity is inherent to NLP, drawing on the fields of computer algorithms, software engineering, statistics, machine learning, linguistics, pragmatics, information technology, etc. In NLP, researchers model language and its use, and build both analytical models and predictive ones. In Professor Diab’s NLP lab, they address problems in social media processing, building robust enabling technologies such as syntactic and semantic processing tools for written texts in different languages, information extraction tools for large data, multilingual processing, machine translation, and computational sociolinguistic processing. Professor Diab has a special interest in Arabic NLP, where the emphasis has been on investigating Arabic dialect processing where there are very few available automated resources.
Title: Faithfulness in natural language generation in an era of heightened ethical AI awareness: opportunities for MT
Commercial Keynote Speakers
Chris Wendt – Microsoft Research
Group Program Manager for Microsoft’s automatic translation service.
Chris Wendt graduated as Diplom-Informatiker from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and subsequently spent a decade on software internationalization for a multitude of Microsoft products, including Windows, Internet Explorer, MSN and Bing – bringing these products to market with equal functionality worldwide.
Since 2005, he has been leading the program management team for Microsoft’s Machine Translation development, responsible for Microsoft Translator, part of Azure Cognitive Services. On the way he delivered Bing Translator and Skype Translator, connecting Microsoft’s research activities with its practical use in services and applications. He is based at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Title: Factor 1000: Better MT, more content, and what we can do with it
Eric Paquin – Translators Without Borders
Chief Technology Officer
Starting his career as an entrepreneur with technology start-ups in the commercial internet and online search space, Eric Paquin then spent 20 years in various roles in the localisation industry before turning his attention to innovation and design thinking. After completing an MSc in Product Management, he spent the last 2.5 years learning about machine translation technologies and machine learning in general, and helping startups defining their strategy and business goals before joining Translators Without Borders as their Chief Technology Officer.
Title: Using language technology to enable two-way communication in humanitarian assistance
Government Keynote Speakers
Andy Way – ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University
Full Professor at Dublin City University, Deputy Director of the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology
Andy Way has more than 25 years experience in Machine Translation R&D, first on the Eurotra project, then by running his own translation company, and subsequently by building up his own world-leading group at DCU. Between 2011–13, he worked in the translation industry in the UK. On Jan 1st 2014, he rejoined DCU as Associate Professor in Computing to take up the role of Deputy Director of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation. In April 2015 he was promoted to Full Professor (personal chair). From Jan 1st 2015, he has been Deputy Director of the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology. From 2009–15 he was President of the European Association for Machine Translation and was President of the International Association for Machine Translation (2011-13). He is also the Editor of the Machine Translation Journal (2007-).
Title: MT Developments in the European Union
Danielle Silverman – U.S. Department of Defense
Management and Program Analyst at US Federal Government
Danielle Silverman is a technology and innovation leader in the US Government (USG) and is recognized for integrating numerous language technologies into operational workflows to enhance translation capabilities for intelligence and national security. Danielle began her career in private sector localization and globalization project management and has worked in improving language technologies, including machine translation capabilities, in the USG since 2011.
Title: Navigating Change: Keys to implementing language technology in government