ADS Drinks & Data: Language Technology for Good

Join us on Thursday, October 13th at 16:00!

We will talk about transparency and biases in current NLP technologies, touch upon subjects such as the use of language technologies to improve accessibility and inclusivity, in particular for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, discussing use cases for existing and future language technologies from the perspective of the City of Amsterdam.

Location
LAB42 Room L3.33 and L3.35 (third floor)

Programme
15:55 Walk-in
16:00 Introduction & Welcome
16:05 Talk #1: Floris Roelofsen (Sign Lab, UvA)
16:20 Discussion
16:25 Talk #2: Jelle Zuidema (ILLC, UvA)
16:40 Discussion
16:45 Talk #3: Iva Gornishka (City of Amsterdam)
17:00 Discussion
17:30 End and Networking!

Talk #1 by Floris Roelofsen
Floris Roelofsen is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (UvA). He is director of SignLab Amsterdam ([https://www.signlab-amsterdam.nl/](https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.signlab-amsterdam.nl%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ca.r.clayton%40uva.nl%7C8b8441c2da024e66e63208da97c29852%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C0%7C0%7C637989159935591570%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=L0Apg8UK5TwdWcpv1FtYIVpNNUMkSY5muaUCOiqrJmk%3D&reserved=0)) and director of the research programme Language Sciences for Social Good (https://projects.illc.uva.nl/LSG/). He has received numerous prestigious research grants including a VICI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for a project on sign language (2022-2026). He collaborates with several organisations, including NS and AURIS.

People with limited hearing- or reading-ability and people with language-related cognitive disorders have limited access to public services, including education and healthcare.
Moreover, societies are becoming ever more multilingual due to globalisation and migration. Language technologies can help to reduce these language barriers, and thereby increase social participation and cohesion. I will focus on the use of NLP and avatar technology to translate written text into sign language.

Talk #2 by Jelle Zuidema
Jelle is an associate professor in Natural Language Processing, Explainable AI and Cognitive Modelling at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. He does research on these topics, directs the Cognition, Language and Computation lab and supervises several PhD and MSc students there. He teaches in the interdisciplinary master’s programs Artificial Intelligence and Brain & Cognitive Sciences and coordinates the Cognitive Science track in the MBCS.

Talk #3 by Iva Gornishka
Iva is a data scientist at the City of Amsterdam, part of the dedicated Urban Innovation and R&D Team which aims to improve the livability of Amsterdam by bringing AI research to the city. As part of the team’s efforts to nourish the municipality's close collaboration with academia, Iva supervises MSc students conducting their thesis research on urban challenges such as managing crowdedness, detecting issues in the public space, or battling poverty.
In this talk, she will give an overview of language technology use cases at the municipality, with a focus on two ongoing initiatives for measuring and improving the accessibility of Amsterdam. Specifically, (1) we can improve the digital accessibility of our city by aiding editors in writing in simple, clear language, and (2) we could increase the physical accessibility of Amsterdam by providing policy-makers and citizens with accessibility-related information extracted from various venue reviews.