BBC Connected Studio, BBC News Labs & BBC World Service are holding a collaborative Hack event in London on 15th & 16th December 2014. We are inviting Academic institutions and professionals involved in Language Tech to take part.

The theme will be “Automated international News Services of the future”, and prizes* will be awarded in various categories TBA nearer the event. While there is a competitive element, the main purpose of this event is networking and collaboration in this space, and to connect the BBC with people in this field.

Please note, that each participating team will need to bring one or more instances of a "Language Technology" to use for their prototypes, and to add to the mix at the event.

We are making some space for interested individuals (e.g. multilingual journalists, or UX designers) *not* bringing their own language tech, but these individuals will need to join a team who are - (we'll help facilitate this.)

By "Language tech" we mean:-

1. Speech to text (ideally in a non-English language)
2. Text to Speech (ideally in a non-English language)
3. Auto Translation between languages.
4. Speech Synthesis.
5. Entity Extraction and NLP in non-English.
6. Surprise us! (another tech involved in multilingual machine-driven systems)

*low value prizes