S P E A K E R S
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Corina FORĂSCU A. Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, at Alexandru Ioan Cuza PhD from Faculty of Computer Science, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași Coordinator of the Erasmus and International Relations E-mail: corina.forascu@gmail.com |
Title:
EMPOWERING THE WORLD AND AFRICA
Harnessing Natural Language Processing for Research, Innovation and Sustainability
Abstract
The talk will give an overview on how Natural Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionizing research, entrepreneurship and sustainable development, with a focus on Africa and Tunisia. The participants will be able to discover and maybe better understand what NLP is and, meanwhile, the transformative impact of language resources &technologies – by enabling computers to understand, process, interpret and generate human language – on business innovation, social initiatives, and environmental sustainability across the world and the African continent.
The first part of the talk will be focused on the main LRTs: what they are, what should be the main objectives for a given language on this domain, how can they be created, inter-connected and exploited in a practical mono and/or multi-lingual setting.
Then, the main objective will be on those NLP applications spanning various domains, including social media, business, research, and environmental initiatives, driving entrepreneurship and innovation to the next level, especially in Africa.
Keywords: Computational Linguistic, Computer science, Entrepreneurship & Innovation in IT, Phonetics, Psycholinguistics, and Sociolinguistics
Biography
Corina Forăscu is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, responsible for outreach activities, managing the faculty’s social media presence, and recently appointed as the Erasmus and International Relations Coordinator for the faculty.
By nature, Corina is a dedicated volunteer, actively involved in causes close to her heart – ranging from nature conservation, biodiversity, bird protection, and climate change to education and science for all, particularly for teenagers. By training, she is a mathematician, who transitioned into computational linguistics through her master’s and Ph.D. studies. Following an exceptional Fulbright-RAF scholarship and, more recently, two courses at Babson University, Corina has committed to bringing entrepreneurship into various fields: in education – at the Faculty of Computer Science, where she developed the first course on Entrepreneurship & Innovation in IT, in high schools, in the broader community, but most importantly, into the mindset of the people she networks with.
In her free time (if any), Corina enjoys traveling, taking nature photographs, birdwatching, reading, playing the piano, spending time with her pets, or volunteering for the local community.
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Gérard POISSON A. Professor Emeritus at University of Orléans, E-mail: gerard.poisson@univ-orleans.fr |
Title:
FORTY YEARS OF MEDICAL ROBOTICS:
Main developments and current challenges
A special look at robotized tele-echography
Abstract
In this presentation, we’ll be looking at the evolution of technological solutions, in terms of both mechanics and control, for the development of robotic devices for the medical sector, since robotics first entered the field in the early 1980s. At that time, various projects were devoted to transferring industrial robotics approaches to a large variety of medical applications, particularly in surgery.
One of the first references in this field was the performance, in 1985, of brain biopsies on some twenty patients in California, using a6 degrees-of-freedom industrial-likerobot. A wide range of robot-assisted medical procedures then emerged in neurosurgery, orthopedics and abdominal surgery. While the first applications were based on the transfer of industrial technologies, dedicated kinematic architectures were developed to meet the specific needs and constraints of the medical sector, with a growing range of applications in minimally invasive abdominal, cardiac or ENT surgery, needle insertion and tele-echography.
Our team was a pioneer in tele-echography, developing and validating, in 1998, the world’s first tele-operated robot for long-distance ultrasound diagnosis. We’ll be taking a closer look at how this technology, initially conceived for space applications, has evolved into tele-operated diagnostics for high-risk areas, to provide diagnostic solutions in secondary hospitals lacking experts, and in the future for cancer detection and monitoring through the fusion of ultrasound and positron emission tomography.
Keywords: Robotics, Medical robotics, Tele-echography, ultrasound, tele-operation, Mechanic, control, automatic,
Biography
Prof. Gérard Poisson is a graduate of the Mechanical Aggregation in 1980, as student of École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France. He received the Ph.D. degree in robotics from university of Orléans in 1994, and the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR), from the latter university in 2004. He has over 40 years of teaching in mechanical engineering, automatics, and robotics in the Institute of Technology (IUT) in Bourges, where he was also the head, from 2008 to 2018.He is author of 130 publications in refereed journals and international conferences, and has more than 100 participations in Ph.D. defenses.
He was one of the founders, in 1988, of the Vision & Robotics Laboratory, now known as Prisme, where he has been working ever since. His research has focused on several aspects on the themes of robotic design and control, for industrial, agricultural, and mainly medical applications. Its works included perception of the environment, telemetry, image processing and data fusion, wheeled mobile robots design and navigation, poly-articulated and actuated mechanisms design, mechanical optimization, tele-operated and co-manipulated robots control, haptic devices design and control.
Its main research activity concerns the robotized tele-echography concept. He was part of the team that carried out a premiere, in 1998, on the application of very long-distance tele-echography. He has continued to work on this theme ever since, on both mechanical and automatic challenges.