ICT2010 Brussels
Applied Language Solutions visited ICT 2010 this year and was proud to see so much innovation coming from the EU.
The show was opened up by, amongst others, the President of Belgium and the Prince of Belgium, highlighting the prestige associated with this important industry event. The main auditorium allowed multilingual presentations to be shown removing the language barrier by having a panel of interpreters and linguists behind the scenes, while the translated versions of what was being said were beamed into our ears using InfraRed headsets. The languages covered were English, French, Italian and Spanish and you simply turned a dial to your language and the headset would repeat what was being said. All clever stuff.
In addition to networking sessions and discussions there was also the ICT Exhibition Forum which included everything from Robots such as the iCub and EEG devices such as the GammACap to home automation and green IT initiatives. A full rundown of what was being exhibited can be found here.
EuroMatrixPlus had a stand in the exhibition room which was manned when I was there by Andreas Eisele and Christian Federmann. I discussed various Machine Translation subjects with Christian on the day and got to talk about our own SmartMATE Machine Translation Solution. Hans Uszkoreit was also there and gave an interesting presentation on Understanding of contents through understanding of languages.
Lots of innovation was on show and we were happy to see a keen interest in green technologies such as renewable energies and carbon credit schemes, which are becoming more and more important in the procurement of services, across multiple industries. Applied Language Solutions has always had green initiatives at our core with paperless offices and cloud computing so it’s great to see so many companies investing in the research and development of additional green technologies that can be adopted by corporates.
With all of the advancements being made in so many different areas, it’s clear that there are a lot of exciting years ahead for Europe.