From spassion at dimacs.rutgers.edu  Tue Mar  2 12:19:50 2010
From: spassion at dimacs.rutgers.edu (Christine Spassione)
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:19:50 -0500
Subject: [Sy-cg-global] Announcement: Reconnect 2010 Program
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20100302121924.016e23f0@dimacs.rutgers.edu>

DIMACS would like to call your attention to Reconnect 2010 program.
Please pass this announcement along to anyone you think might be
interested.

Sincerely,

Christine Spassione
Reconnect Program Coordinator
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RECONNECT Workshop 2010

Extracting and Visualizing Information from Natural Language Text

Where:  University of Southern California
When:   June 6-12, 2010

About Reconnect: This CCICADA/VACCINE Summer Reconnect Workshop exposes 
faculty teaching undergraduates to the role of the mathematical sciences in 
homeland security and provides an opportunity to researchers in government 
or industry to learn about recent techniques in data analytics. Topics are 
presented in a weeklong series of lectures and activities; participants are 
involved in both research activities and in writing materials useful in the 
classroom or to share with their colleagues. Participants may develop 
materials for publication in either the CCICADA Technical Reports or the 
Educational Modules Series published by the DIMACS Center at Rutgers 
University.

Topic: Automatic identification and extraction of desired information from 
natural language text is increasingly used as a way to improve general 
purpose search and has a range of applications in medical informatics, 
business applications, and for the intelligence community. The input is one 
or more texts in the domain in question, and the output is a database 
containing just the desired fields of information, extracted from the 
source material and formatted appropriately. Information extraction (IE) 
techniques have been developed since the early 1980s, and include finite 
state technology, pattern-based extraction, and appropriate machine 
learning methods. This week-long workshop will take participants from the 
early, simpler, methods through the modern ones, and will include 
theoretical and practical topics as well as hands-on exercises using 
software packages. The material is very relevant to the undergraduate 
classroom and to many applications. The lecturers are renowned experts in 
the various aspects of IE and its visualization, and have a long history of 
giving informative, engaging, and fun lectures.

Organizers: Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI; Zornitsa Kozareva, USC/ISI; Midge 
Cozzens, CCICADA.
Speakers: Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI; Zornitsa Kozareva, USC/ISI; Dan Roth, UIUC; 
and John Stasko, GATech

Registration fees, lodging, meals and travel: Academic participants: 
registration, lodging and meals will be provided through DHS funding. 
Government participants: $350. For-Profit Corporation participants: $500 
(includes all meals from Sunday dinner to Saturday lunch). Limited funds 
are expected to be available to waive part or the entire registration fee 
and/or provide partial support for travel.

Deadline for Applications is April 5, 2010 or until all slots are filled. 
Applications are to be submitted online at 
http://ccicada.org/Reconnect/2010/ApplicationChecklistPage.html and will be 
reviewed as they are received.

For more information: Christine Spassione (spassion at dimacs.rutgers.edu) or 
visit the Reconnect web page http://ccicada.org/Reconnect/2010/.

(This Reconnect Conference takes place in Los Angeles the week immediately 
after the Human Language Technologies (HLT-NAACL) conference of the North 
American Association for Computational Linguistics (June 1-6, 2010). 
HLT-NAACL is one of the primary conferences in this field, and participants 
are encouraged to consider attending it as well. See 
http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/).