Network Institute

About seven months ago we, Cérise Muller (Applied Linguistics) and Dana Hakman (Information Studies) embarked on our interdisciplinary journey as academy assistants for the Network Institute. Together we started researching the knowledge bases that are used within
the professional field of bilingualism. With our research we are aiming at providing the best knowledge source possible for speech therapists working with bilingual children in the Netherlands.

The starting point of our research has been an existing knowledge base, in the form of a wiki, created by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and extensive research into the needs of the target group. From there, we have created a new knowledge architecture to enhance the experience of knowledge acquisition for professionals in the field. It has been very rewarding to speak to current users of the wiki and receive constructive feedback on how to make the work of speech therapists easier and therefore help more children who are struggling with languages impairments.

Our current focus is on building the new website which we hope to publish as soon as possible and finishing our research paper. It has already been extremely motivating that our research was accepted for the ICT Open conference earlier this year and we hope to be able to present our finished work at a conference soon. So far it has been an invaluable opportunity to work as an interdisciplinary team and we are looking forward to what lies ahead.

Cerise & Dana

Cerise is currently also writing her thesis on the use of Google Translate in secondary education and will pursue an internship at VSI Subtitling.

Dana is currently also writing her thesis in the form on an internship at the SAS Institute (Computer Software) where she is focusing on the gamification of Data Science.

Food waste happens everywhere: during production, storage and transport, but also in stores, restaurants and even at home. Even though consumers are said to waste the most food, supermarkets and producers play a key role in the food waste chain. Signalling this problem to the media is often taken up by non-governmental organisations and social movements, such as and . For their project, Academy Assistants Sarah Kamphuis and Melanie Jong Tjien Fa are studying how different stakeholders in the food (waste) chain are framed in the public debate. To do this, they will leverage automated content analysis techniques to produce longitudinal social and semantic network maps. These maps will show how the framing of food waste in the public debate changed over time, tracing the relative positioning of the different stakeholders.

In 60 seconds: Wasted food in numbers - BBC News Subscribe to BBC News www.youtube.com/bbcnews 1/3 of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted before it is eaten, the UN's Food and Agricult...

Today Romy van den Heerik, Ellen Droog and Melanie Jong Tjien Fa presented their Academy Assistant research project about creative and constructive language production at the Anela Juniorendag!