Until I see your dream in dark skies

Opium: Reality's Dark Dream

On the book’s cover, Thomas Dormandy’s Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream is advertised to “encompass the entire history of the world’s most fascinating drug.” But at fewer than 400 pages, the book actually reads more like a story, or a series of stories, about opium’s role in various societies. The problem with storytelling, however, is that the whole thing hinges on the use of language. Awkward word...

"I could see your lips move": HAL and Speechreading

One of the amazing capabilities of HAL was the ability to speechread (lipread) the crucial conversation between Dave and Frank, where they discussed the possible disconnection of HAL. In this short essay, we briefly discuss the motivation behind computer speechreading, look at the brief history of the field, and describe the current state of computer speechreading research. Finally, we provide ...

See your brands through your customers' eyes.

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Outback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft and Intel logos on its computers. Such inter-weaving of different companies' brands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management-portfolio mapping--has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arranged along organizatio...

Your dream corpus is already there

The tutorial will provide the attendee with an in-depth look at how to tap the potential of web data as a source of linguistic resources that go beyond frequency counts. Special focus will be given to linguistic resources that can be compiled from web data that was constructed for entirely different purposes. The tutorial will combine the theoretic analysis with the discussion of concrete examp...

Commentary I: skin cancer: clear skies sometimes help.