McLean, VA (March 24, 2009) – AppTek, a leader in human language technology (HLT), today released the results of its joint contest with the Olin College of Engineering to explore the use of AppTek’s core technology — which includes a set of tools for language identification, translation, and text-to-speech services in a variety of languages — to develop a compelling prototype Android application for the Google G1 Phone.
Students divided into four teams and were judged by Olin professors and representatives of AppTek. The resultant prototypes were judged based on their novelty, functionality, usability and potential value to AppTek. This allowed for the teams to be competitive while acknowledging differences in strengths, including technical achievement, business savvy and design/interaction. All teams licensed their final code entries under the Open Source Initiative Approved Simplified BSD License.
“Utilizing the AppTek language backend was an opportunity for our students to really engage the business, design, and technical challenges of developing real-world mobile applications,” said Dr. Mark L. Chang, Assistant Professor at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. “We appreciate the technical and financial support that AppTek provided. It made the contest possible, and the endeavor all the more interesting.”
The completed prototype entries included:
“As a leader in human language technology, we are always looking for ways to support new and innovative ideas,” said Hassan Sawaf, Chief of Research and Development, AppTek. “The Olin College of Engineering gave us the perfect opportunity to take our core technology and truly test its capabilities for use in next-generation mobile applications. All the teams involved developed significant applications which we plan to further explore and utilize in future AppTek offerings.” In appreciation of all the teams’ hard work, AppTek provided a $1,000 cash prize for the first place team, a $500 cash prize for the second place team and a $250 cash prize for the two third place teams. For additional information on the contest and the completed prototypes, please visit: http://mobdev.olin.edu/contest/.
AppTek.ai is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U), large language models (LLMs) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. The AppTek platform delivers industry-leading solutions for organizations across a breadth of global markets such as media and entertainment, call centers, government, enterprise business, and more. Built by scientists and research engineers who are recognized among the best in the world, AppTek’s solutions cover a wide array of languages/ dialects, channels, domains and demographics.
