The African Intellectuals’ Project

Diaspora , Intellectuals , and the State

NO AREA OF PUBLIC CONSCIENCE ILLUST"TES THE ANXIOUS MEETING of state policy and cultural mythology more than illegal immigration. As once-con#dent national polities in Europe and the United States su$er a series of economic shocks, a backlash has gathered momentum, targeting the imported labor that in many ways symbolizes the so% core of the old regimes’ economic foundations. A variety of extre...

Intellectuals and the Rise of Mass Politics

Intellectuals and New Technologies

Critical intellectuals were traditionally those who utilized their skills of speaking and writing to denounce injustices and abuses of power, and to fight for truth, justice, progress, and other positive values. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre (1974: 285), "the duty of the intellectual is to denounce injustice wherever it occurs." The modern critical intellectual's field of action was what Hab...

Terrorism and health: the responsibility of intellectuals?

The African Speech Technology Project: An Assessment

This paper reflects on the recently completed African Speech Technology (AST) Project. The AST Project successfully developed eleven annotated telephone speech databases for five languages spoken in South Africa i.e. Xhosa, Southern Sotho, Zulu, English and Afrikaans. These databases were used to train and test speech recognition systems applied in a multilingual telephone-based prototype hotel...