Short-term scientific missions

What is a Short-term scientific mission?

An STSM is an individual research visit across an international border, enabling the participant to gain and share knowledge. We are looking for people who know about language but not so much about technology, and vice versa, and who want to gain and share knowledge across those academic boundaries.

The STSM is a networking tool offered by COST, aimed at supporting individual mobility, strengthening existing networks and fostering collaboration between COST Action Participants. Learn more about STSMs here: https://www.cost.eu/cost-actions/cost-actions-networking-tools/

Each STSM should specifically contribute to the aims and objectives of LITHME (see our our detailed Memorandum of Understanding), whilst also enabling participants to learn new techniques, and to gain access to specific data, instruments and/or methods not available in their own institutions. Participants do not need to cover all the topics of LITHME, but they should fit the profile of at least one Working Group, and ideally demonstrate learning across the interests of different Working Groups (especially between language and technology).

Financial support is limited to cover travel and accommodation and meal expenses, and is paid in the form of a Grant after the submission of an STSM report (50% pre-grant is possible).

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Further LITHME-specific criteria

LITHME is a very broad network, involving many subdisciplinary areas. The best STSMs will work towards the major goals of LITHME, to prepare linguistics for the human-machine era, and to inform technology specialists with insights from linguistics.

Within this broad scope, there will hopefully be many and varied cases. One example could be an interactional sociolinguist visiting a lab to learn more about interactive Augmented Reality equipment. This could help them to develop new theoretical approaches to interaction, in preparation for widespread consumer adoption of such equipment. Another example could be a lab hosting a language education specialist, who might develop insights into the potential for Virtual Reality and automated translation to create entirely new contexts for language learning.

Meanwhile technology specialists could leave the lab and visit linguistics departments to understand more about, say, conversation analysis – to refine their thinking about the way wearable language tech could alter the fabric of conversation. They might also plan to learn about potential inequalities in deploying (for instance) automated sign language utilities or translation chatbots for public services.

The above is absolutely not an exhaustive list of possibilities. They simply illustrate the principle of the twin goals of LITHME, to prepare linguistics for the human-machine era and to inform technology specialists with linguistic insights. We want to know what you will learn from your visit, what you can contribute to your host, and how this works towards LITHME’s priorities.