Northeast and Northwest Regional Research Centers
Student Application for Workshop Participation


The Advanced Research and Development Activity in Information Technology
(ARDA) Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC) and Northwest Regional
Research Center (NWRRC) were established to advance science that has a
positive impact on Intelligence Community problems.  Our annual
in-residence, multi week summer workshop program is the principal method
by which expert teams from industry, academia and the government work
collaboratively to advance solutions to intelligence grand challenges. A
few outstanding students will be funded to participate in the workshops
based on a highly competitive selection process considering academic
record, science and technology/programming skills, and letters of
recommendation. We will be hosting two workshops in 2004:

        AQUAINT:  An Investigation of Evaluation Metrics for Analytic
Question Answering by Emile Morse and Jean Scholtz (NIST) hosted by the
NWRRC at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. 3
weeks, 7-25 June 2004.

        VACE: A Large Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia Understanding
by Milind Naphade  (IBM), John R. Smith (IBM), Alexander Hauptmann (CMU),
Shih-Fu Chang (Columbia), Edward Chang (UCSB) hosted by the NRRC in
Bedford, MA in the June to August timeframe.

For the AQUAINT workshop, we prefer applicants who have experience in
language processing (especially information extraction or question
answering) and information retrieval.  Students working in human-computer
interaction, usability and human factors are especially encouraged to
apply.  For the VACE workshop, we prefer applicants with information
retrieval, ontology design and evaluation, and/or image and video
processing experience. Knowledge of (linguistic or video) annotation and
corpus based processing is a plus for both workshops.

Please complete and return this application together with an official
transcript and 2 letters of reference as soon as possible but no later
than April 30th to:

Dr. Mark Maybury
Executive Director
Northeast Regional Research Center
c/o The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road
Bedford, MA 01730