What is LingCon?

LingCon is a training day conference for you to learn how to program, how to apply computational linguistics and machine learning tools, and how to create long-term research and development projects that have a lasting impact--all with no competitive pressure. You'll come out of LingCon inspired and empowered to build the project of your dreams.

Is there a code of conduct?

Yes. You are subject to the MLH Code of Conduct.

Who can participate?

High school students over the age of 13 at any experience level are welcome! Not in high school and still want to get involved? Anyone age 13 and up is welcome to be a volunteer or mentor!

When, where, & how much?

LingCon took place on November 18th, 2017 from 9 am to 5:30 pm at 42 US (6600 Dumbarton Circle, Fremont, CA). Thanks to our sponsors, LingCon was completely free!

Photos

A huge thank you goes out to all of the LingCon attendees, volunteers, mentors, speakers, and sponsors for making the inaugural LingCon a success!

LingCon Schedule

9:00 am                                                                                  Check-in Begins
9:30 am                                                                             Opening Ceremony
10:00 am                                                                                        Workshop 1
Choice A: Building Chatbots by Michael Khait (Turbo.ai)
Choice B: Intro to Machine Learning by George McIntire (ODSC)
11:10 am                                                                                        Workshop 2
Choice A: Deep Learning for NLP by Peng Qi (Stanford)
​Choice B: Generating Text with Neural Networks by Melissa Roemmele (USC)
12:20 pm                                                                                                  Lunch
1:30 pm                                                                                          Workshop 3
Choice A: Character Recognition with PyTorch by Abhishek Sharma (Salesforce)
Choice B: How to Build a Text Classifier by George McIntire (ODSC)
2:40 pm                                                                    Project Ideation Session
Lecture: How to Conduct a Computational Linguistics Research Project by Karina Halevy
4:00 pm                                                                              Q&A with Panelists
​Panelists: Siva Reddy, Margaret Mitchell, Jakob Uszkoreit
​Panel Moderated by Karina Halevy
5:00 pm                                                                               Closing Ceremony
​5:30 pm                                                                               End of Conference
Notes: A = advanced, B = beginner

Panelists

Jakob Uszkoreit

Jakob Uszkoreit is a Software Engineer in the Google Brain research team. There he works on deep learning approaches to understanding and generating language, images and other modalities, with applications ranging from machine translation to image super-resolution. He previously started and led the team that designed and maintained the semantic parser behind the Google Assistant, after working on Google Translate in its earlier years. His research interests revolve around models that learn from weak supervision how to understand and ultimately interact with the world through language and vision.

Siva Reddy

Siva Reddy is a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford NLP group. His research goal is to make conversing with computers as easy as conversing with your friend in order to access information and accomplish tasks. Towards this end, he is developing fundamental representations of language which allow computers to understand language and reason. He chose to work on NLP partly due to his personal background. He was born in a village in Southern India, where most of his childhood was spent on farms chasing monkeys to save the crop. He did not know anything about computers until the age of eighteen while the entire western world is already embracing them. While he is fortunate that he can now use computers, many people back home lack basic education and can never use computers unless the interaction with computers becomes natural, which is where language comes in. Through increasing the natural language capabilities of computers, millions of underprivileged and uneducated can then benefit from technology. Siva invites bright students like you to pursue NLP and push the boundaries of what is possible.

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Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell is a Senior Research Scientist in Google's Research and Machine Intelligence group, working on artificial intelligence. Her research generally involves vision-language and grounded language generation, focusing on how to evolve artificial intelligence towards positive goals. This includes research on helping computers to communicate based on what they can process, as well as projects to create assistive and clinical technology from the state of the art in AI.​