Panel on Artificial Intelligence, Language Data and Research Infrastructures @ CLARIN2020

Event name: Panel on Artificial Intelligence, Language Data and Research Infrastructures
Date: Wednesday, 7 October 2020
Time: 10:15 - 11:00 (CEST)
Venue: CLARIN virtual Zoom meeting

This panel is part of the CLARIN Annual Confererence 2020.

About the panel 

This panel will explore the role of CLARIN for the various AI communities working with language data with the help of four prominent AI experts. How can CLARIN support AI research and collaborate with research teams in a way that is complementary to their own solutions, infrastructure support of their institutions, generic (academic or corporate) solutions popular in the community, etc.? What are the crucial next steps for CLARIN to be able to support the new generation of AI research? And what will the future requirements for language data and infrastructures be? 

Panelists

• Prof. Jan Hajic is a full professor of Computational Linguistics and the deputy head of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the School of Computer Science, Charles University in Prague. His interests cover morphology and part-of-speech tagging of inflective languages, machine translation, deep language understanding, and the application of statistical methods in natural language processing in general. He also has an extensive experience in building language resources for multiple languages with rich linguistic annotation, and is currently the main coordinator of a large research infrastructure on language resources in the Czech Republic, LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ. His work experience includes both industrial research and academia. He has been the PI or Co-PI of numerous international as well as large national grants and projects. He is the chair of the Executive Board of META-NET, European research network in Language Technology. 
• Dr Vukosi Marivate is the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (due to the abundance of text data and need to extract insights). As part of his vision for the ABSA Data Science chair, Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is an organiser of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He is passionate about developing young talent, supervising MSc and PhD students and mentoring budding Data Scientists.
• Prof. Marie-Francine Moens is full professor at the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. She is the director of the Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval (LIIR) research lab, a member of the Human Computer Interaction group, and head of the Informatics section. Her main direction of research is the development of novel methods for automated content recognition in text and multimedia using statistical machine learning and exploiting insights from linguistic and cognitive theories.
• Prof. dr. Malvina Nissim is Professor in Computational Linguistics and Society at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is the coordinator of the Computational Linguistics Group of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen. She has been recognised for her excellent teaching with more than one Lecturer of the Year Award at her university. Her current fields of research include author analysis, sentiment and emotion analysis as well as modality and multi-word units. She is also interested in ethical aspects related to Natural Language Processing. 

Moderator

• Ben Verhoeven is a science communicator and improviser from Antwerp, Belgium. He holds a PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Antwerp where he mostly worked on author profiling. In his own company ERLNMYR he currently combines science communication and improvisational theater which has resulted in theatre shows about artificial intelligence and science, hosting events and moderating debates, as well as teaching workshops on public speaking and other soft skills.