NEWS: Due to the spread of the corona virus we decided to postpone the workshop! A new date is not yet set but keep an eye on this page or our mailing list for further updates. Our apologies for the inconveniences caused!

Date: April 24, 2020 – POSTPONED
Venue: University of Helsinki, Porthania P674, Yliopistonkatu 3
Participation: Free of charge but registration is compulsory. Please fill in the online registration form. Registration deadline: April 9, 2020!

Confirmed keynotes by:

Lucia Specia, Imperial College, London
Raquel Fernández, University of Amsterdam
Ákos Kádár, Samsung AI, Toronto
Grzegorz Chrupała, Tilburg University

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are interested in learning meaning representations from multimodal and multilingual signals to improve language understanding in natural settings. We welcome contributions from the speech processing community, NLP research and people working with computer vision.

Tentative schedule

9:15 – 9:30 Welcome
9:30 – 10:15 keynote 1 (Grzegorz Chrupała)
10:15 – 10:45 coffee break
10:45 – 11:45 3-4 short presentations
11:45 – 12:30 keynote 2 (Lucia Specia)
12:30 – 14:00 lunch
14:00 – 14:45 keynote 3 (Ákos Kádár)
14:45 – 15:45 3-4 short presentations
15:45 – 16:30 keynote 4 (Raquel Fernández)
16:30 – 17:30 mingle with posters / demos

More details about the program will be announced later.

Local Information

Accommodation

Hotel Arthur is located right across the street from the department.
Hotel Cumulus Kaisaniemi and GLO Hotel Kluuvi are nearly as close.
Omena Hotels have two somewhat cheaper hotels in central Helsinki, though a bit further away than the options above.
Eurohostel offer even cheaper accommodation, also within walking distance of the venue.
More options are available at the Visit Helsinki accommodation page.

Arriving by air

The Helsinki-Vantaa Airport is located some 17 km from Helsinki city centre and is easily reachable by train. The airport is of moderate size and quite efficiently run, but do allow 1-2 hours before departure for check-in and security. On arrival, you can expect to be out of the airport in 20 minutes after landing.

The easiest connection to the city center of Helsinki is by train. You can also look at other options of public transportation (search for the route from Lentoasema, Vantaa to Unioninkatu 40 if you want to go to the University City Campus; the trip should take about half an hour and cost €5.50) or by taxi which takes a similar amount of time and costs about €50. More airport transportation options can be found on the Finnair website. The schedule for the Finnair city bus is available here.

Local transportation

You can use the journey planner of HSL to find your way along the public transportation system of Helsinki. The department’s central location also allows walking to many destinations in the city.

All public transportation in the Helsinki metropolitan area uses the same ticket system. Single tickets can be purchased with your cell-phone (just download the app) or from ticket machines found on some of the stops.

Single tickets inside Helsinki cost 2,80 € when bought through the mobile app, 2,80 € when bought from a ticket machine, and 4 € when bought from the bus driver (no tickets can be purchased in trams or trains). The ticket is valid for one hour from purchase and you can transfer freely from one line to another for that time. If you plan on using the public transport extensively, there are also day tickets available for periods of 1–7 days.

Map

Here are the directions from the main railway station to the venue of the workshop. There will be signs at the entrance and within the building to guide you to the lecture hall of the workshop.

Local Organisation Team

Jörg Tiedemann
Sara Miyabe

Acknowledgments

The event is funded by FoTran, an ERC grant from the European Union’s Research Framework Programme, Horizon 2020 and MeMAD, a Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 780069. The workshop is also supported by the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) and its special interest group in language, speech and cognition. Thank you!