This spring, Chris Callison-Burch, Ph.D., was in town to share an unusual approach to machine learning. This is one of the hottest topics in computer science: It is behind everything from Google’s self-driving cars to Apple’s Siri personal assistant.

Callison-Burch, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is building a system that can automatically translate foreign languages into English — especially obscure dialects (from an American point of view) that can be of great interest to national security. He was in Birmingham at the invitation of Steven Bethard, Ph.D., a machine learning researcher and assistant professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

In order to teach a computer to do something, Callison-Burch explained, you need to give it examples. Lots of examples. For a French-English translation, there are millions of sample texts available on the Internet. For Urdu, not so much.