Towards String-to-Tree Neural Machine Translation

We present a simple method to incorporate syntactic information about the target language in a neural machine translation system by translating into linearized, lexicalized constituency trees. An experiment on the WMT16 German-English news translation task resulted in an improved BLEU score when compared to a syntax-agnostic NMT baseline trained on the same dataset. An analysis of the translations from the syntax-aware system shows that it performs more reordering during translation in comparison to the baseline. A small-scale human evaluation also showed an advantage to the syntax-aware system.Comment: Accepted as a short paper in ACL 201

Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Buddhism\u27s Worldly Other: Secular Subjects of Tibetan Learning

By analyzing the writings of select Tibetan authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article reflects on the prestige attached to secular (but not anti-religious) knowledge, and the ambivalence prominent thinkers expressed around the proper relationship between worldly and religious learning. Tibetan lay and religious leaders have long been steeped in a classical Indic system of categorizing knowledge, known in Sanskrit as pañcavidyāsthāna and in Tibetan as rikné nga (Tib. rig gnas lnga). Sakya Paṇḍita first established the importance of these fields of knowledge in Tibet during the thirteenth century. Later intellectual figures such as the Fifth Dalai Lama Ngawang Lozang Gyatso and his cohort, including figures associated with the influential Nyingma monastery called Mindroling (Smin grol gling), all acknowledged the significance of rikné even as they struggled to balance their worldly interests with religious concerns. Their writing shows that worldly subjects, distinct from but in combination with the study of religion, have been important in shaping Tibetan thinking and social life for many centuries. Worldly knowledge was and is a basis for political and cultural prestige in Tibetan society as well as a common ground for connecting with the ruling classes of neighboring civilizations, also shaped in part by Buddhism. Over the centuries, the inculcation of rikné among educated Tibetans contributed to the development of a connoisseur class. Further, the Tibetan socio-political theory of the union of religion and the secular (chos srid zung ’brel) and the closely related ‘two traditions’ (lugs gnyis) model, were primary concerns of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his colleagues. These theories articulated an ideal union between worldly and religious power. Precisely how Tibetan literati have understood and valued worldly fields of learning in relation to religious subjects has varied across time, place, and religious tradition. Investigating particular Tibetan statements on the significance of rikné reveals the strong, if notably ambivalent, presence of secular values in Tibetan history and culture

Promoting Entrepreneurship amid Youth in Windhoek’s Informal Settlements: A Namibian Case

Considering the high unemployment rate among Namibian youth and a lack of job opportunities, the promotion of entrepreneurship has gained wider attention in the country. A number of initiatives have been started such as entrepreneurship trainings and workshops, business idea competitions, etc. All these aim to inspire young people to think of alternative income sources. As part of a two-year funded community outreach research and development (R&D) project, we have investigated participatory approaches to engage marginalized youth into conceptualizing their own context, imparting skills, and deriving new career paths. This article reports and reflects on one of the interventions we have recently concluded with a group of youth in Havana, an informal settlement in the outskirts of Windhoek. We conducted what we entitled “The Havana Entrepreneur”, a series of interactions inspired upon the model of the American reality game show “The Apprentice”. Over a number of weeks two youth groups were given challenges to tackle by means of competing against one another. After completion of each challenge, groups were rated by a number of judges on skills demonstrated such as marketing, presentation, reflection and creativity among others. We observed an increase in, and improvement of skills revealed along tasks’ completion, besides an openly expressed self-realization and discovery of abilities by participants. Moreover, the youth are currently engaged in the continuation of activities beyond the initial entrepreneurial interactions. Thus we suggest replicating “The Havana Entrepreneur”, including the recording on camera of it by the youth themselves as a new mode to instigating a wider entrepreneurial spirit in informal settlements

Shelter Development Through Cooperatives: A Strategy for Poverty Alleviation and Slum Improvement for Asia and the Pacific Region

The research traces the flow of humanity from the urban areas to the cities thus creating severe economic and social problems in the cities thus leading to homelessness; lack of sanitation; health hazards; crimes; vandalism; drugs; children wandering around and a host of problems which civic society leaders are not willing or able to act upon because slums are also vote banks for politicians