China

Johannes Keizer engaged as visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Science

I got today my letter of engagement for two years as visting professor at the Institute of Intelligent Machines of the Chinese Academy of Science (IIM, CAS). Professor Rujing Wang, Deputy Director of the Institute is very keen to intensify the contacts with our team at FAO in Rome.

Johannes Keizer at his presentation for staff of IIM, CAS

Given up on dinners and lunches

Headline now should be 5th Dinner, or something like that. But I have given up monitoring. Variety of dishes and quantity of meals is far above my capacity to follow up.

Presentation at the Chinese Agricultural Ontology Workshop

Today I had my presentation at the Chinese Agricultural Ontology Workshop. The workshop started yesterday, but I did not participate as the workshop language was Chinese :-). This was calculated and I was lucky enough to have the entire day to finally compose my presentations

The 4th dinner

I get lazier and lazier. This time I did not record any dishes, but I can remember a memorable composition of fish puree, which is shown in one of the two photos. Another favourite of mine were shrimps cooked on a bed of onions, ginger and mushrooms,

The third Dinner

I have given up to write down all the dishes that we get for meals. We were in 8 this time, so the dishes were more than 20. But I cannot leave out to present you the very delicious Beijing duck which was the center of the menu:

Beijing Duck

Other highlights were perfectly steamed fresh shrimps, the best turbot I have ever eaten in my life, a new type of mushrooms, and as I said at least 16 other dishes.

Meeting with Dr. Meng and his team

In the afternoon of Tuesday 20 I had the appointment at CAAS to talk with Dr. Meng about the future of our collaboration with Agrovoc and the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus. Dr. Meng introduced his new team and especially Dr. Zhang Xuefu, the new technical contact for AGROVOC and the CAT.
I presented the new development around AGROVOC, the transformation to a Concept Server and the AGROVOC conceptserver workbench.

YeeYan.com

Second visit on October 20 was to Yee Yan, (https://www.yeeyan.com), a start up founded by 3 Tsinghua students some years ago. This is not about research and automatic translation. This is about motivated people who want to bring foreign content to China, by creating a network of translators. One of the founders was motivated to start, because his father died of a rare disease by the lack of important information in Chinese language, but which was available in the USA.

National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR)

Tuesday morning, October 20. I am guest of the Research Group of Speech and Language Technology At NLPR, CAS (Chinese Academy of Science). They are working on automatic translation, name-entity extractions, speech to speech translation. Prof. Chengqing Zong, one of the group leaders in the lab, gave us an introduction to the work of the and 2 demos of systems. NLPR by itself is amazing. More than 200 researchers in 5 research groups.

Beijing in the sun and dinner

Monday evening, just for sunset I arrived in Beijing, nice weather, warm and sunny, but fresh. Air in Beijing gets better. The airport is now enormous. I had not seen it for years.

All is new and shiny, the terminals are linked by an internal train. But, there is now also an external Expresstrain, which links the airport to the city center. But obviously :-) we took the taxi.

Asian Mirror for www.fao.org necessary

This morning, at the Harbin Institute of Technology I gave embarassed up, when trying to get www.fao.org on the screen. It was tooooo slow, much slower than other sides. I have read that 10s is the maximum time that people wait for a website. If this is true at Harbin Institute of Technology www.fao.org will not be used! To get a more objective impression I made a pinging of some websites sending 3 datablocks to www.google.com, www.johanneskeizer.com and www.fao.org.

johanneskeizer.com