Phonetics Lab alumnus and Miðeind CEO Dr. Linda Heimisdottir (PhD 2015)  received the main Sky IT award for Miðeind's outstanding contributions to Icelandic Information Technology.

The award was given by HE Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, president of Iceland, at the UTmessan 2024 event earlier today. UTmessan is one of the largest IT events in Iceland, and it's purpose is to highlight the importance of information technology and its effects on individuals, businesses, and Icelandic society alike.

The award recognizes Miðeind’s substantial contribution to Icelandic language technology and artificial intelligence, as well as their successful collaboration with OpenAI, aimed at supporting Icelandic in their LLMs (Large Language Models).   

About Miðeind:

Miðeind is a privately owned software company based in Reykjavík, Iceland, specializing in Language Technology (LT), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for the Icelandic language.

The company's mission is to enable Icelandic businesses and the public to benefit from the rapid global progress now happening in the fields of Language Technology and Artificial Intelligence.

In addition to "traditional" LT tools, Miðeind is implementing AI-based services for Icelandic, such as text summarization and question answering.

Most software developed by Miðeind is open source and freely available on GitHub under GNU GPLv3 or MIT licenses. Use of the software under a different license is negotiable.

Phonetics Lab alumnus Dr. Robin Karlin  (Ph.D. 2018) has accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Missouri. 

Cornell Arts & Sciences undergrad students Genie Enders and Luis Hernandez Rocha are conducting summer Linguistics research  as part of the Nexus Scholars Program.

Working with Professor Sam Tilsen and Assistant Professor Helena Aparicio, Genie and Luis are studying how speakers plan and produce sentences when describing dynamic visual scenes.

The project combines eye tracking and sentence production to investigate how the timing of environment visual information influences syntactic and phonological planning processes.

To study this phenomenon, Genie and Luis have successfully recruited subjects and conducted experiments in the Linguistic Department's LiME (Linguistics Meaning) Lab, and they are also conducting online web-hosted experiments through the Phonetics Lab. 

Genie and Luis  are part of a cohort of 101 students in Arts and Sciences chosen for this program this year.

Dr. Jennifer Kuo has joined the department as an Assistant Professor.  Jennifer  is primarily interested in how different learning biases affect morphophonological learning.  She addresses this question by modeling how paradigms are (mis-)learned over time in a variety of Austronesian languages.  More recently, she is supplementing these findings with experimental results from Artificial Grammar Learning studies.

We welcome Jennifer to the Department and to the Phonetics Lab!