Juicy Fridays: Yorick Wilks

Charonite's Malta based team has a tradition of regular events held on Fridays for all the development team, called Juicy Fridays. On a Juicy Friday afternoon we discuss various different topics that are of interest to the whole team, in an ongoing effort at continuous improvement.

Occassionally, we invite external speakers to participate at our Juicy Friday events. Recently, Professor Yorick Wilks, who acts as our Chief Scientific Advisor on our advisory board, gave us an inspiring presentation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Semantic Web. Professor Wilks' insight and depth of experience made for an informative and often entertaining afternoon. As most of our developers have some experience in either NLP or Search Engine technology, the event proved to be quite interesting as various points ranging from the finer points of using RDF as a knowledge representation technique to the future use of NLP techniques in a search engine architecture were raised and discussed.

Professor Yorick Wilks at Charonite

Prof. Wilks brings a wealth of experience to Charonite, having over 40 years of experience in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing.
Amongst other awards, Yorick has won the British Computing Society Lovelace Medal in 2009, which is considered to be one of Britan's highest honours given to individuals who have advanced Information Systems significantly, with past recipients being Sir Tim Berners-Lee (WWW inventor), Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse) and Linus Torvalds (Linux original author). Yorick has also won the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and the Antonio Zampolli Prize in 2008 (similar to the Nobel prize, in the Natural Language Processing field).
Yorick has pioneered various AI technologies, including the invention of one of the first practical Machine Translation systems at Stanford University in 1973, and forming part of the team that won the 1997 Loebner prize in AI.