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KMi Seminars
Syntactic measuring of language distances
This event took place on Friday 17 December 2010 at 13:00

 
Prof. Giuseppe Longobardi University of Trieste

Beyond its theoretical success, the development of molecular biology has brought about the possibility of extraordinary progress in the historical study of classification and distribution of different species and different human populations, introducing a new level of evidence on diversity (molecular genetic markers) apt, among other things, to quantitative and automatic treatment. I claim that, even in the cognitive sciences, purely theoretical progress in a certain discipline, such as linguistics, may have analogous historical impact, and in turn be confirmed by such results. Thus, I will propose to unify two unrelated lines of investigation:

  1. the study of syntactic variation (parameter theory) in the biolinguistic program
  2. the reconstruction of phylogenetic relatedness among languages
I will suggest that we are now in the position of measuring the syntactic distance among different languages and populations in a precise fashion and to explore its historical significance through the application of clustering algorithms borrowed from computational biology. The historical success of the resulting taxonomies may then support the reliability of the new method of distance calculation.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities