#24 AI Series: cohere - B. Ermiş

NOTE: We changed rooms and will now be in C130!

We are excited to feature Beyza Ermiş, who is currently a Senior Research Scientist at cohere and will discuss "Scaling AI Safety Across Cultures and Languages", lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the talk, seize the opportunity to connect with fellow AI enthusiasts to share ideas and questions while enjoying free drinks and pizza. Door close by 7.15pm, so please come early! Also, "attend"ing (RSVP) here on Meetup is strictly necessary to be guaranteed entry.
Please note that Meetup has recently been quite keen on promoting its Plus program. However, you are not obligated to purchase it, as both our events and the platform remain free.

Who is this event for?
This event is open to everyone interested in state-of-the-art AI research. We especially design it for students, PhD candidates, academic researchers, and industry professionals with a research focus in machine learning.

Abstract: Modern AI systems are deployed globally, across cultures and in hundreds of languages, yet most safety research and evaluation remains English-centric. In this talk, we will outline a pragmatic roadmap for scaling safety beyond a single linguistic or cultural frame. We will first outline AI safety as a full-stack technical discipline spanning robustness, alignment, privacy, misuse resistance, and critically, evaluation. We will then argue that harm is not universal: what counts as harmful varies with local norms and histories. Drawing on evidence from multilingual red-teaming and jailbreak studies, we will show higher failure rates in low-resource languages and the limits of translate-and-test approaches. We will introduce a global-vs-local harm lens, address data scarcity and long-tail challenges, and present actionable mitigations. Finally, we will examine fairness in model evaluation and close with concrete recommendations for building culturally aware benchmarks and auditing multilingual safety so models are not only capable, but reliably aligned with the communities they serve.

Bio: Beyza is a Senior Research Scientist at Cohere in Berlin, working on large-scale machine learning with a focus on language models. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist at Amazon Web Services (2017–2022) and held research assistant and intern positions at Boğaziçi University and Amazon, where she worked on applied machine learning problems. She completed her PhD and MSc in Computer Science at Boğaziçi University, following a BSc in Computer Engineering at Bilkent University.

We are BLISS e.V., the AI organization in Berlin that connects like-minded individuals who share great interest and passion for the field of machine learning. This winter 2025/26, we will, again, host an exciting speaker series on site in Berlin, featuring excellent researchers from Tübingen AI Center, DeepMind, Microsoft, King's College London, cohere, and ETH Zürich.
Website: https://bliss.berlin
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bliss.ev.berlin

Disclaimer: By attending this event you agree to be photographed.