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

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.

Continue reading “LPCN attends CIAA 2018”

Hilda checks out our robotics lab

Hilda and her mother recently visited our robotics lab. Hilda operated the Double robot through our corridors and met one of our Pepper robots. Hilda is interested in robots and technology, and wanted us to teach the robot more words such that it understands more and is more interactive. We are working on it until your next visit!

Robots learn to help with elder care

Robots are taught how to communicate in a more human like manner in a new research project targeting the elder care of the future.
– Some things robots do better than people, says Thomas Hellström who is in charge of the project.

Read the full article on Fria (in Swedish).