With 60 million refugees on the move, more than ever before in human history, we must understand who is among them to secure the land and protect the individual. Join us at HLTCon to discuss how innovations in HLT are leading the challenge. You will have a unique opportunity to network with fellow senior officials, expert linguists, technologists, and product owners across industry and government.
Keynote
Dr. Patricia O’Neill-Brown
Chief, Human Language Technology, CIA
Dr. Patricia O’Neill-Brown is the Chief of Human Language Technology (HLT) for the CIA. She is responsible for developing the strategy for implementing HLT across the enterprise. She is a leading expert on HLT, including machine translation. Dr. O’Neill-Brown holds a Ph.D in Computational Linguistics from Georgetown University.
Cracking the Code to the Next Breakthrough in Machine Translation
Everyone is looking for the next breakthrough in machine translation. No one believes that machine translation is a completely solved problem. Most people would like to see machine translation systems produce higher quality results.
A good translation is one where the meaning of the source is preserved, and it is rendered correctly in the target language. Users expect accuracy on all of the various levels–grammar, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
Dr. O’Neill-Brown has been carrying out research and development aimed at improving machine translation accuracy. Her work includes the development of novel methods that take advantage of semantics and pragmatics to increase user understanding of machine translated results. This talk will present the results of these research and development efforts. Dr. O’Neill-Brown will discuss how these techniques aid user understanding of machine translated results and boost machine translation quality.
Featured Speakers
Karthik Dinakar
Reid Hoffman Fellow
MIT
Karthik Dinakar is a PhD candidate and Reid Hoffman Fellow at MIT. He is a computer scientist in the fields of machine learning, natural language processing and human-computer interaction to compute for empathy. 
John Frank
Founder and CEO
Diffeo
John is an entrepreneur and theoretical physicist with a long-standing interest in improving how people digest complex information. In 1999, John founded MetaCarta, which pioneered map-based search with statistical natural language processing that helps people find everything written about any place. 
Dr. Catherine Havasi
Founder and CEO
Luminoso
Dr. Catherine Havasi is co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence (AI) text analytics company Luminoso. Dr. Havasi is a research scientist in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics at the MIT Media Lab. 