Typologie d'actualités: Conversational Brains

A look back at the Bratislava Online COBRA Training Event… and perspectives!

A look back at the Bratislava Online Training Event organized by the European COBRA project

The European Conversational Brains (COBRA) project, funded by the European Commission for a period of four years (2020-2024), organized its first training event last week, from March 22 to 26. This event included a series of courses given by Susanne Fuchs (ZAS, Berlin), Peter Hagoort (MPI, Nijmegen), Martin Pickering (Univ Edinburgh) and Kristof Strijkers (LPL). COBRA's non-academic partners (DAVI, Furhat, Orange, ReadSpeaker) presented their artificial dialogue systems in a Show & Tell session. The doctoral students - including Emilia Kerr and Lena Huttner of the LPL - also gave a first glimpse of their progress, and that was a key moment of the week.

This event also made it possible to finalize the first version of the data management plan on OPIDoR, to announce the creation of a open data pool on Zenodo, and the setting up of an e-training platform on MoodleCloud, combined with another shared Jupyter-type platform for the training of doctoral students in the fields of statistics, calculation, and programming. Moreover, the doctoral students have opened a blog on the COBRA site, in which they will present their activities at regular intervals.

The week was thus extremely rich and intense, it offered everyone the opportunity to get to better know all the doctoral students and to strengthen ties within the network. Fortunately, the participants did not just work: Stefan Benus, the organizer of the event, invited all members to participate in an online police investigation, which took place in Bratislava. It was really exciting! 😉

And the perspectives...

The next event will take place from May 17 to 21 and will be organized by the Aix-Marseille team. It will be preceded by an online seminar given to doctoral students entitled “How to give engaging scientific talks”. Doctoral students will be called upon to make an even stronger contribution than during the 1st event, and will notably have to carry out a hackathon on data processing. It is also planned to offer doctoral students training in statistics tailored to their needs and provided by Shravan Vasishth and Audrey Bürki (Univ Potsdam).

The next events will be organized by our partners in Edinburgh (second semester 2021) and Ferrara (first semester 2022).

More information:

Contact: Noël Nguyen (Project coordinator)
Website: www.conversationalbrains.eu
Twitter: @CobraNetwork

European project COBRA – Call for 15 PhD projects now open!

As part of the European COBRA project, a call for applications is open for 15 doctoral contracts. Application files must be submitted before March 31, 2020 on the website http://conversationalbrains.eu.

COBRA (Conversational Brains) is a project carried out within the framework of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks program. It brings together 14 partners in 10 countries (France, Great Britain, Italy, Slovakia, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Hong Kong), including 10 academic partners and 4 industrial partners. COBRA is a continuation of the European MULTI project previously carried out by the LPL, and is closely linked to the ILCB Institute. It aims to develop research and advanced training in the field of relationships between brain and language, in human-human and human-machine conversational interactions, and in a wide variety of languages. COBRA is coordinated by Noël Nguyen.

European project COBRA accepted!

We are pleased to announce that the COBRA (Conversational Brains) project has been accepted by the European Commission as part of the Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks program. COBRA brings together 14 partners in 10 countries (France, Great Britain, Italy, Slovakia, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Hong Kong), including 4 industrial partners. It will run for four years, starting in 2020.

COBRA is a continuation of the European MULTI project previously carried out by the LPL, and is closely linked to the ILCB Institute. It will contribute to developing research and advanced training in the field of brain-language relationships, in human-human and human-machine conversational interactions, and in a wide variety of languages. It will open wide perspectives for our students in cognitive science and language science, at doctoral level and on a European scale.

The overall budget is 4 million euros. The project was prepared with the support of Protisvalor. It is coordinated by Noël Nguyen.

Link: http://conversationalbrains.eu

In addition, a press release has just appeared on this subject in the last issue of AMU's letter: