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Date: 1 October 2002 (tuesday)
Time: 7:15 pm
Venue: library@orchard, Ngee Ann City (Orchard Road)
Title: Tools for Building the Next Generation Multilingual Web
Speaker: Mr. Chow Yen-Lu, Managing Director, WholeTree

Abstract

The worldwide Web is going global and fast. Today, over half of web users speak a native language other than English. 78 percent of Web site content is still written in English - the native language for just 6.2 percent of the world's population. By 2005 or sooner, more than 1 billion Web users will use the Internet, with 700 million from outside the U.S. By year-end 2003, the North America user base will account for less than one third of the worldwide user base (down from 42.4%), while Web usage within key international markets continues to expand at a breakneck pace. E-commerce revenues in Western Europe and Japan will account for almost half of the world's total by 2003, up from 28% in 1999.

The globalization of Internet will have profound impact for companies everywhere. To compete effectively in the global marketplace, businesses must communicate in the language of the customer, not the company. The payoff for going global, in terms of language, is huge. Potential consumers are three times more likely to make an online purchase when they are addressed in their native language (Forrester Research). And to successfully participate in the new global economy, operating a multilingual web presence is a must.

Building, and maintaining a multilingual Web presence is a complex and ongoing process, requiring capabilities in multilingual content management, multilingual content creation, searching and retrieval, multilingual content transformation and translation, and multilingual customer support. We'll use as case study WholeTree's WholeWeb e-globalization platform. WholeWeb is a fully integrated suite of software solutions that work seamlessly together (or separately) to help companies operate and maintain their multilingual digital presence and allow them to effectively manage the most complex and demanding e-globalization requirements. It automates the business processes required to quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively create, localize, deploy, and maintain multilingual web content. Built on Unicode and multi-byte language capable foundation, WholeWeb is a powerful and flexible platform that can handle the most complex double-byte languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Biodata

Yen-Lu Chow is the Managing Director of WholeTree, a Singapore-based multilingual technology and globalization software provider. He was a venture partner with Venture TDF, a Singapore-based venture capital firm with an international footprint, venture advisor to SAIL Port Asia Pacific, a speech and language incubator, and is an angel investor and advisor to start-up companies in Asia and in the US.

Mr. Chow has over 18 years experience in speech and language arena, and a recognized international leader in the industry. He was co-founder & CTO of AsiaWorks, a Singapore-based technology start-up focused on delivering multi-modal speech dictation, handwriting recognition, and keyboard input solutions for Asian language markets; VP of R&D, Lernout & Hauspie Asia, at one-time the leading speech and language technology company in the world; Distinguished Technologist & speech program chief scientist at Apple Computer, Cupertino, USA; Technology Director, Apple-ISS Research Center, senior scientist at Dragon Systems, a leading provider of speech recognition systems for the personal computer, and BBN/GTE, a leading research lab in the area of speech, artificial intelligence, and networking.

Mr. Chow developed several award-winning technology products, including PlainTalk, the world's first PC-based speaker-independent speech recognition system; CDK, the first mainstream Chinese dictation system at Apple that received the Best-of-Best award from Comdex Asia 1995; and SPK, the world's first integrated multi-modal speech, pen & keyboard input solution for Chinese computing which won an award from the Hong Kong government.

Mr. Chow has given many presentations and seminars on speech and language technologies in international conferences and workshops, and is recognized as a leader internationally in Chinese language computing. He has over 30 publications in conferences and journals and 12 patents filed internationally. He received his MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and successfully completed Apple's MBA program for senior managers.