University of Szeged (SZTE)
http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/

Department of Software Engineering – SZFT

The Institute of Informatics at USZ was formed in 1990. One of the Institute’s main departments is the Department of Software Engineering. The researchers of the Department have many years of experience in the field of static and dynamic analysis of software systems, and they conduct researches in the fields of embedded and mobile systems, computer networks, software quality, software development and maintenance, and open source, .Net and Java technologies.

The researchers of the Department have been participating in more than a hundred national and international R&D projects. DSE currently participates in an EU funded project as a consortium member. In the Collaboration@Rural (EU IST FP6 IP project), it is developing a collaborative platform for working and living in rural areas by creating a wireless mesh communications solution, a secure information exchange framework and a product path information system. The Homokháti Small Area platform developed within the framework of C@R gives the basis for the Homokháti Living Lab, which performs the testing tasks of this project.

By applying the experiences gathered during the research activities in the fields of embedded systems and open source software development, The Department of Software Engineering is able to create a safe framework system for the tools and services that are to be developed during the project.

Research Group on Artificial Intelligence - RGAI

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Szeged is responsible for a growing number of IT undergraduates, on the one hand and for the high standard IT formation of students of other faculties of the University, on the other. Every year, more than 400 students begin their studies at this department. In the curriculum of the Department, the presentation of the results, methods and application possibilities of the most recent artificial intelligence projects plays an important role. The staff of the Department has been involved in such research projects for many years, and entered into the ILP BRA 6020 ESPRIT project as early as in 1993. In this international project (with cooperation between ten European universities and research institutions), the foundations of the ILP (Inductive Logic Programming) were developed. Following the conclusion of the project, the ILP2 (LTR 20237) ESPRIT project was launched in 1996, involving the staff of the previous project. The tasks concentrated on the elaboration of actual ILP algorithms and on the potential fields of application. From all the applications, natural language processing has proved to be one of the most promising fields since realizations connected to logic programs has always played a major role here.

The Department became one of the founding members of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) consortium in 2003 which elaborates recommendation concerning the diverse technologies of computerized text representation. In the same year, the first Conference on Hungarian Computational Linguistics (MSZNY) was organized by the Department.

Presentations of the most recent results and achievements of research and development activities conducted in the field were presented at the two days conference before an audience of almost 100 people. The Program Committee edited the Proceedings of the conference. The event was organized in the subsequent years as well, in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. In the present proposal, the Department wishes to apply its research results in the field of artificial intelligence to the practical solutions. In our earlier linguistic projects, computational learning algorithms were successfully applied to lexical disambiguation, to the recognition of noun phrases and to the learning of Hungarian syntax. The envisaged system is based on formal linguistic units, in the first place, the foundation of which is the Hungarian syntax. In the future, a syntax-driven machine translator is planned to be developed, in which respective translations of the Hungarian linguistic structures are assigned to the given syntactic rules. The Department has gained international fame of delivering high standard researches in the field of analysis of formal languages, and translation systems.