Language Science Day 2016 was a huge success, bringing together over 100 UMD language scientists.  The event focused on strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration within our community and identifying opportunities to develop team-based research initiatives.  Check out the LSD 2016 photo album or read more about event activities below.   

Poster Sessions

The poster sessions are always a highlight of LSD. Teams of collaborators or researchers with similar interests explain the goals and fruits of their work to the broader language science community. Over twenty research groups from across campus participated in the poster session. Presentations showcased diverse approaches to questions in language science and highlighted opportunities for other researchers to identify common interests and possibilities for collaboration.

Discussion Sessions

This year's LSD also included two discussion-intensive sessions focusing on strengthening collaboration within our community. 

Art of Collaboration

The first session focused on generating specific ideas for what individuals and institutions can do to facilitate collaborative, interdisciplinary research. Each table of participants engage in a guided discussion of the benefits, challenges, and risks of collaborative research, drawing on personal experiences to identify what works well and what doesn’t. This session was led by Jan Edwards (HESP) and Jeff Lidz (Linguistics).

Research Themes

The UMD language science community has the cross-disciplinary expertise needed to tackle real world challenges, like language poverty and learner differences, flexible automatic speech recognition, and technology for low-resource languages - to name just a few. The second session focused on cross-cutting research themes currently developing in the community. Faculty representatives introduced big picture challenges motivating the development of interdisciplinary collaborations. Participants connected with other researchers who share their interest in particular themes, and signed up to stay connected with emerging interest groups.