Everyday, the events that shape our world
are covered by thousands of media sources
Tens of thousands of bloggers
and right now we don't a good way for
drawing these together
we also don't have a good way for taking those across the language boundaries
Meedan can do that
We envision Meedan as a resource for people who want to get local understanding
of the global events that shape our world
On the Meedan system
everyday
we have a team of editors and translators
working to sift through the most relevant of the western and Arab media
translate that
and make it available to our users
If you want to understand an event that happened in Amman, Jordan
you go to Meedan to see a translated copy of that day's story in Amman, Jordan's leading newspapers
you can also pivot to see bloggers who publish near Amman
users on our site from Amman
This is a way of sorting for local knowledge
Meedan has very clear ambitions of improving the state of the art
of Arabic - English machine translation over time
This is going to enable not only better access to media
but better access to knowledge
across the web
With IBM Research we hope to fundamentally forward the cause
of creating more collaborations across this language pair
on the Internet
Meedan's approach to translation is unique
We are taking a combination of state of the art machine translation
and enabling translators on our system
to improve all those translation outputs
and create feedback loops into the system
so the system actually learns over time
With 1.3 billion users online
and soon to be 4 billion mobile handsets in use
the world ought to have systems for sharing knowledge
for sharing conversation
and for creating a shared understanding
Meedan is that hope.