The university is one of the first universities to gain access to an advanced data processing system run by IBM and Google, which is normally reserved for corporate use.
Several months ago, IBM and Google gave the university access to this new technology in hopes of grooming tech-savvy students who can use the program and possibly be hired by the companies.
“IBM and Google need people who know this stuff,” said Amy Weinberg, an associate professor in the linguistics department, the co-director of Computational Linguistics and Information Processing and the area director for technology at the Center for Advanced Study of Language. “It’s good for the university because [the technology] is expensive.”
Called “cloud computing,” the technology links computers together to process information simultaneously. It allows huge amounts of data to be processed in a fraction of the time it would normally take using a single computer, which processes data one item at a time, said Jimmy Lin, an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies and the coordinator of the project.
The clouds work by “munching and crunching through data,” Lin said.
Some graduate students and faculty from CLIP, a computer-related language program, have been using the clouds to try to create a program that automatically translates Chinese and Arabic into English. Researchers feed translations done by humans into the cloud, which calculates the probability that a specific word will translate into another specific word in another language.
“In my research, my biggest problem is dealing efficiently with a lot of data,” said Chris Dyer, a graduate student who works with the cloud. “This is many times larger and can do things many times faster.”
Dyer, who has been working with the cloud for about a month, uses it to create translation “rules,” which tell the computer how words should be translated. He said he would like to be able to use the cloud to do automatic translation directly, making the computers process the rules automatically.
The cloud is made up of several hundred computers, and IBM and Google plan to add several thousand in the future, according to the companies’ statements. This will allow for even faster data processing.
This university is one of six universities – including the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley – that were given access to the technology.
“It’s really cool that the university is mentioned in the same breath as all these other big names in technology,” Lin said. He added that it was likely chosen “by reputation.”
Timothy Hawes, a graduate student in the department of Linguistics, uses the clouds to analyze communication in the Supreme Court for a project called the Digital Docket. The project dissects sentences by diagramming their grammar and structure.
“While each sentence may take only a second or two to process, processing them all on a single computer may take a couple of days. With ‘cloud computing,’ the same task takes less than an hour,” he said.
Lin said he hopes to create university courses that use the cloud, allowing a larger pool of students to work with the program. However, he hasn’t made any formal plans since he has only had access to the technology for a short time.
The technology is especially convenient because it is available over the Internet, so a computer scientist does not need to be in the same location as the cloud cluster, Lin added.
“You could be on an island in Fiji with good Internet connection and be able to access the cloud,” Lin said.
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