2021 Black in AI Social @ NAACL

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The Conference will take place on June 6–11, 2021.

Black in AI Social: Sign in & General Informations

• Sunday 2021-06-06 9:00 - 11:00 AM (PDT)/4 PM GMT (convert to your timezone)
• Sign up for the social here
• Important Note: You do not have to be registered for the conference before you join the social! But if you do want to join the conference, use the subsidy here.
• We will be operating with the official NAACL Code of Conduct, please read here

• The links for Zoom, Glimpse and Ohyay will be sent to everyone who signs up using the registration form. Note: We don't keep your data stored. After the social, all information provided on the form will be deleted.
• Social Program

• Speed Networking (Glimpse): Glimpse is a speed networking platform, where you will have time to have a 1-on-1 conversation with someone who is also participating in our social. In addition to being fun, you can connect with several people in the community.

• Karaoke presentations (Ohyay): Game time! In this game, we look forward to your engagement. We will have a slide deck with topics that will only be revealed on the spot, and each participant should present a quick talk about that topic as soon as it appears. No rehearsing, totally improvised on the spot. We will admire your creativity!

• Open Discussion: Is the diversity of African languages an advantage or a challenge in building an NLP model? (Zoom)

To end our social, we will have 30 minutes of open discussion about African languages ​​in the NLP ecosystem and we will have African panelists to foster our open debate. Join us!

Moderator:

Bonaventure Dossou
Bonaventure Dossou is Co-initiator @edAIOfficial and MSc + Innovation Award 2021 @jacobs_bremen. AfricanNLP from Masakhane NLP & Deep Learning Research Intern Mila Quebec.

Meet our guests:

Wilhelmina Ndapewa Onyothi Nekoto (WON Nekoto)
Wilhelmina Ndapewa Onyothi Nekoto is a former Rugby player, who traded her rugby boots for advanced STEM studies. She derives maximum satisfaction from work that makes a meaningful impact, especially on alleviating the plight of vulnerable communities. Among her many roles and projects, she is also a researcher on the Masakhane project, which organises natural language processing researchers like Nekoto to work on low-resource African languages - especially for the preservation of the wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoekhoegowab language and ǂNūkhoen culture, and her native Oshiwambo.

Hady Elsahar
Hady is a Research Scientist at Naver Labs Europe. His main research interests are NLP and Natural Language Generation with a recent focus on EBMs for constrained sequence generation. Hady holds a PhD. from Université de Lyon in France and previously interned in Microsoft, IBM and Bloomberg. He participates actively in the Masakhane community for African NLP. hadyelsahar.io.

Paul Azunre
Paul Azunre holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and has served as a Principal Investigator on several DARPA research programs. He founded Algorine Inc., a Research Lab dedicated to advancing AI/ML and identifying scenarios where they can have a significant social impact. Paul also co-founded Ghana NLP, an open source initiative focused on using NLP and Transfer Learning with Ghanaian and other low-resource languages. He also serves as Director of Research at Dun & Bradstreet, a company helping businesses manage supply chain risk and other business analytics challenges. He is the author of the recently published book "Transfer Learning for NLP" by Manning Publications.

Social Organizers

Any questions about our social, you can contact the organizers directly.

Foutse Yuehgoh

‍P.h.D student at CNAM, Coexel

Salomey Osei

‍Researcher, NLP Ghana

Mírian Silva‍

UFMG, IBM Research

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