De La Salle University - Manila

Quo Vadis Pilipinas Series 
Crossroads & Tipping Points: uncovering the transformational role of ICT in good governance and disaster management

Center for ICT for Development (CITe4D)

The Center for ICT for Development (CITe4D) aims to provide a venue for dynamic collaboration in research and innovation initiatives in the field of ICT for Development (ICT4D). The main goal CITe4D is to present a Lasallian response to the challenges of the new knowledge society and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be diffused and utilized to address human development and poverty alleviation issues.

The center envisions the promotion of innovative, relevant and viable research and development initiatives. Believing in the complexity and diversity of human development, the center promotes a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach in its research and development program.

Aside from its research program, the center intends to establish a dynamic network of individuals, academics, and private/public sector professionals committed to the diffusion/utilization of ICTs to address human development issues and concerns.

CITe4D is currently under the supervision of the Advanced Research Institute for Computing (ADRIC) and the Information Technology Department of the College of Computer Studies, De La Salle University.

Mission

Present an ICT-enabled Lasallian response to the challenges posed by the current social-digital divide in the Philippines.

Objectives

• Develop courses and academic tracks relevant to the advancement of the center's research and development thrust
• Assist policy and decision-makers to respond to the needs/demand of the emerging knowledge society and ensure its diffusion to marginalized sectors of society
• Engage with stakeholders from the public/private sectors and civil society regarding the center's ICT4D initiatives
• Design and Deploy relevant and viable technology solutions to address developmental issues and concerns
• Study the impact of digital technologies on people, organization/communities, and society
• To be a significant contributor to the body of knowledge in the area of ICT4D

Philosophy of CITe4D

Believing in the old saying "To READ is to LEAD", center's philosophy shall be embodied through the acronym READ:

R- RESEARCH

The center shall be involved in the formulation of relevant research studies. Relevance of research initiatives shall be guaranteed by its impact on target entities and stakeholders of human development.

E- ENGAGEMENT

The center recognizes the importance of internal and external engagements. Formation of linkages is seen as a vital component support the overall strategy of CITe4D.

A-ADVOCACY

The center shall promote advocacies on relevant issues concerning human development and the role of ICT. Related to engagement, the center's advocacies shall be part of its research and development agenda.

D-DIFFUSION

Recognizing the importance of research diffusion, the center shall endeavor for the mainstreaming of its research and development efforts. This emphasis on research diffusion shall ensure impact and development of best practices for the center.

Content from DLSU-Manila: ADRIC: CITe4D : Center for ICT for Development
http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/research/centers/adric/cite4d/

Center for Language Technologies (CeLT)

The Center for Language Technologies (CeLT) of the College of Computer Studies is composed of 5 full-time faculty members dedicated in the pursuit of researches that deal with both programming languages and human languages. The Natural Language Processing Research Team is now under this center.

Faculty members involved in the center spearhead projects and mentor undergraduate and graduate students that include the areas of:

• Plagiarism detection in programs
• Program Slicing and Algorithm Detection
• Automatic and Semi-automatic Creation of Linguistic Resources
• Automatic machine translation;
• Natural language understanding which also includes morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and possibly discourse analysis;
• Information extraction that transforms any free-form written texts into structured, database-like representations;
• Natural language generation that involves automatically generating text reports, summaries, and even stories from any raw computer data like tables, databases, ontologies, etc;
• Information retrieval which searches and returns relevant data through natural language pre-processing and queries; and
• Dialogue systems that allow human-like interfacing with computers through question-and-answer mode or through dialogues.

Aside from spearheading and promoting the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in the country, the center is posing as the de facto NLP research hub in the Philippines. The group is a member of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC), Asian Federation of NLP (AFNLP), Parallel Grammar Initiative (PARGRAM) of Palo Alto Research Center (XEROX-PARC), and STIC-Asia, with many tie-ups and collaboration with other researchers in the Asian region.

Content from DLSU-Manila: Research: Natural Language Processing
http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/research/centers/adric/nlp/