1. Introduction

This is a second draft for the daily timetable and delivery schedule for the masterclass to be delivered in Manchester 12–14 September 2017. The syllabus is also available.

2. Staffing and timetable

We believe in the value of hands-on engagement with the technology, so this masterclass will be a balanced mixture of lectures and lab work. All lectures will be delivered by experienced academic staff from the University of Edinburgh's world-leading School of Informatics. They will be joined, depending on course enrollment, by one or two postgrads or postdocs for the lab sessions, to ensure very high-bandwidth interaction between staff and participants. We have found that participants working together in pairs makes practical work both more enjoyable and more effective.

• 0900–0945   Lecture On 1st day only:
  Including introductions
• 0945–1000   Q&A
• 1000–1015   Coffee
• 1015–1115   Lab
• 1115–1130   Break
• 1130–1215   Lecture
• 1215–1230   Q&A
• 1230–1330   Lunch
• 1330–1430   Lab
• 1430–1445   Break
• 1445–1530   Lecture
• 1530–1545   Q&A
• 1545–1600   Tea
• 1600–1700   Lab
• 1700–1730   Lab Q&A On last day only: Wrapup/feedback
• 1730   Close

3. Deliverable calendar

See draft timeline. This will undoubtedly be modified as experience grows.

4. Staff

Henry S. Thompson is Professor of Web Informatics, based in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

He studied at the University of California at Berkeley between 1968 and 1980, divided between Computer Science (BA, MSc) and Linguistics (MA, PhD). While still at Berkeley he was affiliated with the Natural Language Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he participated in the GUS and KRL projects. His research interests have ranged widely, including natural language parsing, speech recognition, machine translation evaluation, modelling human lexical access mechanisms, the fine structure of human-human dialogue, language resource creation and architectures for linguistic annotation.

After his arrival in Edinburgh in 1980, he quickly became a leading member of the British and European speech and language processing research community, working via UK- and EU-funded projects on language resource creation, machine translation evaluation and the use of real language in linguistic theory and practice. He was a member of the Steering Committee which oversaw the creation of the British National Corpus, and took a lead role in the publication of a number of key language datasets, including the first freely available non-American English corpus (ECI Multilingual Corpus 1), the first corpus of parallel data from the major European languages (Multilingual Corpus for Cooperation) and the first fully-annotated high-quality natural spoken English corpus (HCRC Map Task Corpus). He has consulted for Xerox and Microsoft and delivered training classes in the UK and the US.