Our Lucky Moments with Frederick Jelinek

is contribution is going to be a congratulation to Frederick Jelinek’s birthday jubilee. Before I reach the very congratulation I would like to remind a lucky moment that had a strong influence on the life of a certain Institute of Charles University in Prague aer 1989. And it is by no chance that the honored person witnessed the above mentioned moment and its consequences. From my personal point of view, I have become one of the ”victims” of this lucky moment so I really appreciate the opportunity to wish well to Fred via the Prague Bulletin circulating the institutions over the world. e crucial events in November 1989 in Czech Republic brought freedom to a lot of people. Freedom to scientists in the group of computational linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University changed (among other things) their subdepartment into an independent department of the faculty in 1990, namely the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL) headed by Eva Hajičová. Freedom to Fred Jelinek made it possible for him (among other things) to give a two term course on spoken and written language analysis at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1991-1992. At that time, Fred was a senior manager of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY and he was heading a group carrying out research on continuous speech recognition, machine translation and text parsing andunderstanding. While being inPrague, hewas looking for aCzech scientist to offer him/her a position in his IBM group. e first one who he asked refused. e second one did not. But what is more important, the second one was the present director of ÚFAL Jan Hajič. As far as I know the search for a candidate was running via the question Do you know someone who would be interested to spend some time at IBM? So Jan was among those addressed and he did accept Fred’s offer. e experience with the statistically based machine translation that Jan acquired at IBM became crucial for the next progress of ÚFAL. In 1993, Fred moved to Baltimore and became the director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University. His very nice idea of the summer workshops came into life for the first time two years later in 1995 and lasts till now when CLSP invites proposals already for the 14th workshop.