Social Calendar of  "Summer School in Asian Language Processing"

[Picture Gallery]

The closing ceremony and graduation dinner for the summer school was held on 6^th August, 2006. Mr. Rizwan Amin Sheikh, Chairman of Punjab Information Technology Board, awarded degrees to the participants of the Summer School. The attendees included the international and national participants, prominent members of IT industry in Lahore, rectors and Senior IT faculty from universities & board and

senior members of FAST-NU.  The keynote address at the event was given by Mr. Awais Malik, Head of Value Added Services at Mobilink on “Opportunities & Challenges to Mobilink Presented by Offering Mobile Services in Local Languages”. This topic was chosen in light of the work planned in this area by the Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing in the near future.
 

Ms. Maria Ng Lee Hoon, Regional Senior Program Specialist with the PAN Asia Networking (PAN) Program Initiative of IDRC, also spoke at the event. She talked about the vision of the Project, and the critical part played in the realization of this vision by the Regional Secretariat in Pakistan, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences. She also shared that the objective of the Project is to empower the digitally divided population of

developing Asia.  Ms. Maria is the person who developed the concept of the PAN Localization Project in a long term multi-national framework and has been the guiding force behind it.
 

The participants of the Summer School in Asian Language Processing spoke very fondly of their time in Pakistan. When asked for feedback they all agreed that they had learnt much during the course of two and a half months . It is believed that the advanced topics covered in the summer school will enable the country project teams of PAN Localization project to achieve the objectives set for the development of future local language technology.