08-20-2008

Levin Coaches Gold

Add Lori Levin to the list of coaches who have helped their performers win a gold medal. The associate research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute, recently returned from the sixth International Linguistics Olympiad in Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria, where as an associate coach she helped U.S. high school students win 11 of 33 awards, including gold medals in individual and team events.

Sixteen teams from around the world participated in this year’s Olympiad. U.S. Team 1 won a silver cup and U.S. Team 2 won a gold cup in the team competition. Team 2 also won the trophy for highest combined score in the individual competition. Hanzhi Zhu of Shrewsbury, Mass., captured a gold medal in the individual competition.

The U.S. team members, which included Josh Falk from Shadyside Academy, were selected from more than 750 high school students who participated in qualifying events at Carnegie Mellon and other sites across the U.S. and Canada. Levin described them as “brilliant young people who live and breathe languages, linguistics and problem-solving.” The national and international Olympiads are designed to identify students who have the talent and interest to become computational linguists. “I already feel like they are colleagues,” said Levin, co-chair of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad.

Locally, the computational linguistics competition has been sponsored by Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon’s Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach, the University of Pittsburgh, M*Modal, Vivisimo and JustSystems Evans Research.

Byron Spice