As a continuation of some issues related to her thesis, Raquel Hervás has completed a research stay of six months at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. In collaboration with the Genesis research group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Raquel has applied some ideas from her thesis to the analysis of referring expressions in narrative texts and newspaper articles. Her visit has also created collaboration links between both groups and the definition of different lines of common future work.

NIL has been granted financial support for a 3-year (2010-2012) research project in conjuntion with LDC and JULIETTA research groups.

The main objective of the MILES project is the generation of verbal instructions in 3D virtual environments to assist users with different degrees of disabilities, based on the use of a dialogue engine, a natural language generator and an ontological representation of the of the physical space and the user.

More information in the Projects section.

Federico Peinado will participate as a keynote speaker at Tempo 2009, VII Festival de Música y Arte Contemporáneo de Albacete.

The title of the talk is: Los videojuegos y sus fronteras. Desafíos de producción y diseño para las nuevas generaciones. It will be given at Paraninfo UCLM, on 22nd October 2009, 10:30 h.

Game Guru, a pedagogical adventure game about the videogame industry created by Federico Peinado, has won the best game award of the CVEEL'09 Seminar at the Facultad de Informática UCM.

A beta version is available to download. The final version will be released after this summer.

Delta-R and NIL have signed a collaboration agreement for research in natural language and business rules. Press Releases:

• CMS-Spain.com
• Herencia.net
• Incubaweb.com
• Bpm-Spain.com
• Bi-Spain.com
• OTRI
• Canal de Resultados de la Investigación de la UCM
• Madri+d
• SINC

Pablo Gervás has been invited to the Purple Blurb that will be celebrated the next Wednesday May 20, 6pm-7pm, at MIT in room 14E-310.

Purple Blurb is a free and open-to-the public event. It started in Fall 2007 and it has been organized by Nick Montfort, assistant professor of digital media. Purple Blurb is a serial of conferences about digital writing. As it's sayd in Purple Blurb webpage, digital writing is "any work where computation and digital media intersect with writing practices, including creative and nonfiction ones".

Daniel Dionne and Salvador de la Puente, with Carlos León, Pablo Gervás and Raquel Hervás, went to ENGL09 in Athenas.

Daniel and Salvador submit their GUIDE system, a virtual guiding software, to the 1st GIVE challenge and obtaining great results as we can saw at the challenge journal of the workshop.

Also, they presented their first paper, A Model for Human Readable Instruction Generation Using Level-Based Discourse Planning and Dynamic Inference of Attributes Disambiguation describing a valid modular architecture to design and produce virtual guiding systems focused on the capabilities of the final users.

NIL's researcher Carlos León will attend the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity thanks to a grant he has received from the National Science Foundation (award #IIS-0906244).

NIL's researchers Pablo Gervás and Carlos León visit Mexico DF for demonstration of NIL's research lines and for participating in the 3rd International Colloquium in Creativity, Cognition and Computers, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first computer installation in México.

The NIL research group hosted the 5th International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity. It was held in Madrid. More details are available in the workshop web site, from 17th to 19th September 2008.