The Riga Summit on the Multilingual Digital Single Market is held in Riga, Latvia, on April 27-29 under the patronage of the President of Latvia. The goal of the Riga Summit is to forge a unified vision and launch the strategic agenda for the multilingual Digital Single Market. The Riga Summit is an associate event of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. At the three-day Riga Summit, more than 350 participants from across Europe will develop a combined strategy, identify goals, and initiate concrete actions to bring about this crucial vision for a Digital Single Market without language barriers, which is instrumental for empowering Europe in the global world.
In addition to a high-level Plenary on April 28, Summit will include several events: META-FORUM 2015, a conference on innovative language technologies for multilingual information society; the CEF (Connecting Europe Facility) conference “Towards a Connected Multilingual Europe”; and the MultilingualWeb workshop, which aims to raise the visibility of best practices for dealing with language on the Internet.
Distinguished speakers will include representatives from the European Parliament, European Commission, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Tilde, World Wide Web Consortium, Microsoft, SAP, ESTeam, The Economist, Europeana, The Guardian, EurActiv, SDL, Translators Without Borders, and Deutsche Welle, as well as researchers from leading European R&D centres and national language councils.
Opening sessions will be unveiled by Latvian Minister for Foreign Affairs Edgars Rinkēvičs; the Head of the Committee of European Affairs at the Parliament of Latvia, Lolita Čigāne; Latvian Minister for Environmental Protection and Regional Development Kaspars Gerhards; Latvian Minister for Culture Dace Melbārde; the Deputy Director General for “Information Society, Media” at the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, Andreas Goerdeler; the Head of Unit “Data Value Chain” at the European Commission, Márta Nagy-Rothengass; Director of NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence Jānis Kārkliņš; and Member of European Parliament Algirdas Saudargas.
The Riga Summit will mark the launch of the strategy document Strategic Agenda for the Multilingual Digital Single Market prepared by the European language technology research and industry community. The Strategic Agenda outlines the strategy for establishing the multilingual Digital Single Market and describes the specific language technology solutions that can help overcome language barriers in Europe, thereby making a truly integrated Digital Single Market a reality.
The Riga Summit is co-organized by the European Commission DG Connect, together with the European language technology association LT-Innovate and the European research network META-NET. The local organizing partner for the event is language technology company Tilde.
More information:
www.rigasummit2015.eu
info@rigasummit2015.eu
