Attack of the Sudden Visiting Researchers

(This is the last in a series of ranty posts, about the events of a particularly... "exciting" week. Yeah, I hear many sighs of reliefs — or is it just one since I really only have a readership of one? )

'Twas the morning before the ScienceFund project presentation, and I was waiting for CC to come to the lab so that I could set up the demo system on his laptop.

When suddenly...

Mr T appeared and told me to quickly come to the office, 'cos the main office just made a surprise call saying that a team of visiting researchers from a Thai university are coming down to each of the labs, so, yeah, get ready to receive them and show them around.

"When's that happening?"

"In, uh, like, 5 minutes' time."

Well thank you Main Office for the short notice. Though I guess everyone forgot everything else with the ScienceFund projects for the last one and a half weeks, so it's probably unfair to blame them.

Receive the visitors, eh. (And then what?) Mr Tan the word was to brief them about the research we do. Sure, get someone to talk, but we were in a bit of a fix: Dr T wasn't around. Dr R wasn't around. I was the only RO around in the lab at the ungodly hour of 11am (hey everyone was exhausted the whole week scrambling for the presentations and reports). Mr T had already dragged out Dr S, but she's into linguistics and not really crazy about the "computational" part — and on seeing me she said "Oh good, you're here. You can do the talking then."

Ack.

Then I remembered about the brochures for last year's open day, and luckily we still have a few copies lying around in the office. And then it's scurrying back to the lab to hopefully find a big enough space for 7–8 people to huddle around a computer monitor (Dr S' suggestion) and to hopefully locate some online demos that we can show (Dr C from next door's suggestion).

They came.

I gabbed. Tried to gab. Then showed them the online machine translation prototype, the multilingual lexicontology (yeah it's a mouthful, but the real project name is even worse) and the (not quite reliable) sense tagger.

Surprisingly the visitors were deeply interested (and even impressed with the sense tagger)! The questions they asked showed that they were no strangers to NLP. They even left name cards (which I yet again embarrassingly told them I didn't have one since I'm a mere down-trodden RO. ) En A who escorted them around said that of all the labs visited thus far, this lab was the longest time they spent.

On a side note — En A (sorta cluelessly) remarked that this was also the most run-down/unimpressive (something to that effect, dunno the exact word used 'cos this was re-told to me later by Mr T) lab they've seen that day. To which Dr S retorted "Well this is the lab where the people do real work!"