The National Conference on Computational LInguistics and Information Retrieval (NCCLAIR-2014) has been successfully organized during 29-31 December 2014. It is the first national level conference organised by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Govt. Engineering College, Sreekrishnapuram, and incidentally this happens to be the first conference at any level conducted by the college. The conference brought together researchers working in the areas of Indian language computing, Machine Translation, Speech Processing, Information Retrieval, Big Data Analysis, Machine Learning and other related fields. The conference was sponsored by TEQIP-II. There was active participation both from Academics and the industry.
The event began with tutorial sessions on 29 December, Monday. The first tutorial was on the topic “Data Science: The Industrial Perspective” by Mr. Samaj George, Innovation Consultant, EY - Global Talent Hub, Trivandrum. The tutorial was a gentle preview into potential industrial applications of Big Data analysis, that was derived from his 14 years of experience in the field. The next was a tutorial-cum-workshop on “Big Data and Hadoop” by Mr. Robert Jesuraj, Data Analyst (NLP Engineer) at EY. He demonstrated internal working of Hadoop on Big Data. The final presentation was by Dr. Govind D, Assistant Professor (Center for Computational Engineering), Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. The topic was “Issues in Expressive Speech Analysis and Synthesis”, which reflected his work experience as the project lead in the UK-India education research initiative project (2007-2011) entitled “Study of source features for speech synthesis and speaker recognition”, between IIT Guwahati and University of Edinburgh. Dr. Govind is currently investigating the ongoing DST sponsored project titled “ Analysis, Processing and Synthesis of Emotions in Speech”, at Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. He has more than 20 research publications in reputed conferences and journals.
On the second day, i.e., 30 Dec Tuesday, we had the inaugural session in which the keynote address was delivered by Dr Rajasree MS, Director & Professor, Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management - Kerala (IIITM-K), Technopark,Trivandrum. She shared her experience in Computer Science Research. Dr. Rajasree has more than 23 years of rich service in government in several capacities including teaching, research , and administration. She is currently serving as a member of several committees constituted by the government as a technical expert. Two parallel sessions of paper presentation followed. There was also a tutorial on “Reinforcement Learning via Least Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI)” by Dr Mohammed Shahid Abdulla, Assistant Professor, Information Technology and Systems, IIM Kozhikode. His academic positions include Assistant Professor (Avionics), Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Trivandrum, India and Researcher, General Motors R&D, Bangalore, India. With his presentation skills he conveyed the complex algorithm in a simple understandable way.
On the final day, i.e., 31 Dec, Wednesday, the tutorial session was on the topic Data Mining Algorithms in Bio-informatics with special emphasis to Clustering Biological Data by Dr K A Abdul Nazeer, Head, Dept. of CSE, NIT Calicut. This was followed by two parallel sessions of paper presentations. Dr Rajasree, Dr. P. C. Reghu Raj and Dr. Ajeesh Ramanujan were the chairs. There were papers from the industry, academic, UG and PG students. In the valedictory session, Best paper award was given to the paper, “CRF-based Unknown Word Tag Prediction for Malayalam” by Amal Babu, Alen Jacob, and C. Naseer. The chair conveyed their remarks on the papers presented, and the decision to publish selected papers from the conference in the coming issue of CLEAR Journal published by the CSE Department.
