WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:25 — 32.3MB)
Host Robert Shull interviews IU Professor Mike Gasser about his Machine Language Translation project, about the Progressive Faculty Coalition (PFC), and about the World Social Forum. Mike explains that the language project is about a lot more than just translation. It involves, among other things, machines learning to evaluate texts for bias or point of view and involves many languages that are spoken by millions of people but are less often used in mechanized language projects. Mike explains that the PFC is a coalition of professors who have a wide range of opinions on major issues but who find some common ground a such issues as pro-civil rights, anti-war, etc. The World Social Forum (WSF), he tells us, has grown up as a “balance” to the WTC and World Economic Forum. The most recent WSF held in Brazil was attended by close to 200,000 people. The object of each of the hunderds of events at the WSF is to come up with concrete “things you can do” to alleviate the problem under consideration. There have been regional social forums in the US but the first national forum will be held in Atlanta in summer of 2007.
