Inauguration of HiTZ (Basque Center for Language Technology)

Thursday November 5th 2020

  • Morning session (11:30): official inauguration (in Basque and Spanish)
  • Afternoon session (15:00): Inaugural speech (in English)

 MORNING SESSION (11:30):

  • HiTZ zentroaren aurkezpen bideoa.

  • Eneko Agirre, HiTZ zentroko zuzendari jaunaren mintzaldia.
  • Eneko Goia, Donostiako alkate jaunaren mintzaldia.
  • Jokin Bildarratz, Eusko Jaurlaritzako Hezkuntza sailburu jaunaren mintzaldia.
  • Markel Olano, Gipuzkoako diputatu nagusi jaunaren mintzaldia.
  • Nekane Balluerka, UPV/EHUko errektore andrearen mintzaldia.

AFTERNOON PROGRAMME (in English) (15:00):

Inaugural speech by Eduard Hovy

Agenda:

  • 3:00pm - Presentation of the Webinar (German Rigau, deputy Director of HiTZ)
  • 3:02pm - Presentation of HiTZ (Eneko Agirre, Director of HiTZ)
  • 3:15pm - The Birth of a New NLP Centre: Making the Most of a Newborn Technology (Eduard Hovy )
  • 3:55pm - Questions and comments
  • 4:15pm - End

Description of the talk:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is at a very exciting time in its history.  In the last 5 years a new technology has revolutionized the way we do our work.  Even without special adaptation it tends to work better than almost every prior method, and yet we still don't really know how it works!  So this is also a dangerous time: how can you trust a system that might (and sometimes does) do very strange things for which you can find no explanation or correction? In such a situation it is not a bad idea to look at the history of NLP, what NLP is at its core, and how the new technology fits into the NLP landscape.  And, most importantly, where NLP is going (with or without this new technology) and how we can best prepare for it. The HiTZ Centre has a wonderful opportunity to help shape a future in which NLP will be as ubiquitous and as useful as the cellphone.

If you are interested to participate, please complete this registration form.