TLDR: we nailed it!
After four years of intensive collaboration across Europe and beyond, we’re delighted to share our Final Achievement Report which has now been verified by the COST Association. It’s available on our page in the COST website here (scroll down to ‘Action Documents’). Here are some highlights of what we achieved over the last four years:
- Our forecast report on emerging language technologies has been downloaded over 4,000 times and received 46 academic citations to date, demonstrating significant impact in the field. The report was publicised with press releases translated across Europe, resulting in over 70 media reports including a report in Slashdot (which has 34.6 million monthly views), articles in major venues like the Brussels Times and the BBC, and a feature-length segment on the Spanish national broadcaster RTVE.
- Our professionally commissioned animations and public survey showcased a number of likely future scenarios, and helped make our insights more accessible to different audiences.
- Collaboration within LITHME led to 56 peer-reviewed publications, showing our support for international collaboration and novel interdisciplinary insights. Indeed, in 2022, COST showcased LITHME with three other COST Actions as an example of interdisciplinary collaboration.
- We successfully organized two major public roadshows featuring leading tech companies like ReadSpeaker and Nvidia.
- Our annual conferences and Working Group workshops brought together academics from different disciplinary areas, and practitioners from industry, government, and charities, creating new lasting networks that would never have happened otherwise. We also funded dozens of individual researchers to undertake international visits to extend their networks and develop new collaborations.
- Our annual training schools involved expert tuition from our Working Group chairs, as well as industry showcases from companies including Microsoft, as well as the highly popular ‘pecha kucha’ presentations from all trainees. Each year the training school showed consistent improvement in participant satisfaction, rising from 7.18/10 in 2021 to 8.63/10 in 2024.
- We’ve established a permanent legacy through the new Special Interest Group Humans, Machines, Language within BAAL, which has already attracted over 200 members. At time of writing, the call for papers for its inaugural conference is open!
While COST Action networks like ours can face challenges in achieving their objectives, we are proud to share that LITHME achieved all of our intended goals. COST’s evaluation of our final report specifically praised our “mix of public events, academic networking and engagement with stakeholders from industry and civil society.”
Finally, we in the organising committee of LITHME would like to emphasise the importance of our employers giving us the flexibility to pursue this kind of open-ended networking, given the successes we have now achieved. Such flexibility can sometimes come under scrutiny, even being seen as a distraction, but LITHME’s success is a clear illustration of its value and continued importance. This allowed us to build bridges between academia, industry, and public stakeholders in ways that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. It’s clear that this success stems from having the institutional backing to pursue ambitious international collaboration.
Anyone who showed an interest in LITHME is very welcome to join the successor network mentioned above – Humans, Machines, Language. Although this will not have the same generous funding, nevertheless we are confident of maintaining the same productive interdisciplinary and international dialogue in the field of human-machine language technologies.