Photos from IOL 2011

Team USA at the IOL: Photos (Part 2)
CMU's bagpipe-playing robot, "McBlare," performs at the opening ceremony.

An array of shiny medals is on display as the teams walk into the Awards Ceremony.

Professor Dobbs gives an explanation of the problem-solving methods behind the notorious barcodes problem, which was the last problem on the individual contest.

Team USA Red wins the Team Competition!

Photos from IOL 2011

Team USA at the IOL: Photos (Part 1)
Members of the three teams from USA as well as the team from Canada wait for interviews in Carnegie Mellon's Gates Computer Science building.

Professor Dragomir Radev, NACLO organizer and Team USA coach, directs the interviews.

Lori Levin, NACLO organizer and IOL 2011 director, is interviewed as well.

Members of Team USA converse before the Opening Ceremony of IOL 2011.

Another Week in Preparation

Since IOL is fast approaching (only about two more weeks), practice as a team is now an important goal. Our last practice session involved solving a problem from the OzCLO (the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad) involving a conversation between two speakers of the West African language Bambara. The problem itself required careful analysis of the time events occurred as well as whether or not the speaker was present at the event. Each team did the problem separately and then discussed the answers to the problem. Good teamwork is essential for performance, so the next couple of weeks will probably work towards that as well.

Preparing for the IOL 2011

In recent weeks, all of the top 20 competitors in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) have been preparing for the IOL. To prepare for the IOL, as well as select teams out of the top 20, online practice sessions were held via Skype. Using these practices, as well as related assignments, the teams were selected.

So far, the practices have mostly consisted of solving problems as a team. Many of the problems were past IOL team problems that required many people and were more difficult to solve. Vietnamese, from IOL 2009, was one that everyone never fully solved, since it was so long. Other problems included Armenian, which involved listening to sound files to write down Armenian in its own orthography, as well as translate the sentences to English.

In order to prepare for the IOL, all team members also individually solved the IOL 2010 team problem, Mongolian, and also wrote their own problems based on a specific linguistic phenomenon.