The Weeks Media Update

A quick post with info on how the work of CASA (home of digital urban) has been used and featured in the media this week:

CNN USA and The Discovery Channel both made use of Tweet-o-Meter to demonstrate the use of social media after the earthquake in Japan, including an interview with Steven Gray:

http://www.discoverychannel.ca/Article.aspx?aid=31124 we of course wish the work used in happier circumstances.

Ollie’s Cycle Network Map in Wired is now online at:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/start/bike-routes-for-a-city-with-no-tube

Tales of Things was featured on ABC Australia, looking into Mass urbanisation: why do we flock together?

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2011/3153206.htm#transcript

It was described as a mix of Facebook, The Antiques Roadshow and eBay.

QRator (our QRCode Museum interactive signage work in association with The Centre for Digital Humanities) featured on the New Scientist site:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/a-new-lease-of-life-for-extinct-animals.html


Finally, QRator can also been seen on BBC Science with a nice video showing QRator in action:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12711455

Voice Search in underrepresented languages

Welkom*!

Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages. We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

Check out the Google Research Blog for more details.

Salani kahle!**

* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer