The Dartmouth Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics would like to invite you to the following session: Time: Thursday, November 8th 2012 6 - 7:30 pm Location: Carson Hall room L02 Speaker: Sravana Reddy (Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College affiliated with Linguistics and Computer Science) Seminar Topic: "What do we Know About the Voynich Manuscript" Pizza will be served. Abstract: in 1912, a book collector named Wilfrid Voynich acquired a curious object from Europe: a 240-page, lavishly illustrated folio in an unknown script. At-tempts to decipher the text have all hit a dead-end, with the jury out on which (if any) language it represents, or if it's a code or gibberish. The availability of statistical tools and ideas from machine learning opens up new ways of approaching this problem. I will talk about methods to infer simple linguistic patterns from a given text -- can we tell if a script denotes vowels and consonants? or if pages have "topics"? -- and what that might tell us about the Voynich Manuscript. Along the way, I will also introduce some commonly used machinery and algorithms in com-putational linguistics, and their applicability to other tasks.