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ForskarFredag 2022

ForskarFredag is part of European Researchers’ Night and took place on October 1 this year. However, ForskarFredag is just not about one night: school classes can “borrow a researcher” throughout the entire week (September 26 to October 1). LPCN’s Anna Jonsson took part in this initiative and visited 17 school classes: 4 physically in Umeå and the rest via Zoom.

“A one-eyed cat riding a skateboard into the apocalyptic abyss but not warzone”

Together with the school classes, Anna examined different sorting algorithms, saw examples of discriminating technology, and generated images using AI (the results of which are sprinkled across this post). For one of the high school classes, Anna had prepared a mathematical problem, as can be seen on the instagram page of the school.

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Attending the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022)

  • Dublin rooftops which of some are hit by a rainbow dropping from a cloudy sky.
    A rainbow over Dublin.
  • Image from the Trinity College Dublin courtyard. Beautiful old buildings are surrounding it and in the middle of the yard, there is green grass.
    Trinity College Dublin.

The ACL 2022 conference took place May 22-27 at the Convention Centre Dublin, and we are happy to say that LPCN was represented in the form of its members Johanna Björklund, Frank Drewes and Anna Jonsson who were invited to present their paper Improved N-Best Extraction with an Evaluation on Language Data.

An ill-dimensioned panorama photo portraying the view from inside of the Convention Centre Dublin with brown couches in the foreground.
Attempt at a panorama photo from inside of the Convention Centre Dublin.

Below follows the 12 min long presentation video that was made in preparation for the conference.

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The EQUITBL project at the AI for Good Breakthrough Days

On Monday the 29th of September, Hannah Devinney presented the EQUITBL project at the AI for Good Breakthrough Days main stage event. The project is one of three winners in the Breakthrough Days’ Gender Equity Track.

This interdisciplinary project explores ways of combining qualitative and quantitative methods in order to explore and understand how bias and stereotypes manifest themselves in large text collections, such as those commonly used to train machine learning models in language technology. We also develop tools for mitigating the detrimental effects bias, stereotyping, and underrepresentation can have when the ML models are integrated into AI systems used for decision making.

The project members are:

  • Hannah Devinney, Computing Science, Centre for Gender Studies, and LPCN, Umeå University
  • Henrik Björklund, Computing Science and LPCN, Umeå University
  • Jenny Björklund, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University

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Recruiting PhD students at Dragonskolan

On Wednesday, LPCN’s Anna Jonsson visited a group of young and fantastic women all enrolled in Teknikprogrammet at Dragonskolan. The mission was to recruit as many (future) PhD students as possible. The first step was to tell them what a PhD student is and does; the second step was to get them interested in choosing a computer science programme at the University after finishing high school. Sadly, Anna immediately scared them off by introducing formal grammars (as usual). At least the attendants got a great deal of fika for the trouble from the awsome woman (also named Anna) who organises these tech-for-girls meetings. Better luck with the recruitment next time!

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LPCN attends CIAA 2018

Two junior members of LPCN, PhD students Adam and Anna, travelled to Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island in Canada in the middle of the summer for a vacationlike CIAA 2018.  Adam made sure that they got there on time by running as a champion through Heathrow after a delayed flight. When safely at the conference, Anna presented A Comparison of Two N-Best Extraction Methods for Weighted Tree Automata (Johanna Björklund, Frank Drewes and Anna Jonsson). Moreover, both students showed great eating skills throughout the stay. Below follows a bunch of photos that hopefully prove to the concerned supervisors that their students actually went despite the heat wave.

CIAA 2018 group photo. Photo: Chris Vessey.

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