Presentation
This session features five of the most successful efforts in building AI data models, tools and datasets with a strong commitment to transparency and data sovereignty. Tune into how LAION is fostering an open-source, open-science community to develop foundational AI models and datasets; how BigScience and Hugging Face tackled legal, technical and ethical challenges in deploying their BLOOM multilingual Large Language Model with the help of over 1,000 researchers; how Masakhane is decolonializing NLP research and building language models made by language community members; how OpenGPT-X is developing a globally competitive language model tailored to European needs; and how AI4Europeana is becoming a hub for the application of artificial intelligence technologies in the European cultural heritage sector!
Presenters:
Christoph Schuhmann (DE), LAION
Giada Pistilli (IT), BigScience and Hugging Face
Ndapewa Onyothi (NA), Masakhane
Chelsea John (IN), OpenGPTX
José Eduardo Cejudo Grano de Oro (ES), AI4Europeana
Ndapewa Onyothi (NA)
Ndapewa Onyothi is energized by the vision of creating Language Models using quality data derived from African history, culture and folklore. Inspiration, ingenuity and innovativeness has enabled her to find Data Science and applied Software Engineering solutions in mining, tourism, academic research and business development for more than 7 years. A former professional rugby player, she is a Data Science Coach by day, and member of the board of directors at the Masakhane Research Foundation – A pan African effort whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.
Giada Pistilli (IT)
Giada Pistilli is a philosophy researcher specializing in ethics applied to Conversational AI. Her research mainly focuses on ethical frameworks, value theory, and applied and descriptive ethics. After obtaining a master’s degree in ethics and political philosophy at Sorbonne University, she pursued her doctoral research in the same faculty. Giada is also Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face, where she conducts philosophical and interdisciplinary research on AI Ethics and content moderation.
Chelsea John (IN)
Chelsea John is a researcher at Jülich Supercomputing Center. She is part of the Accelerating Devices Lab. Her areas of interests are in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analyzing and optimizing GPU applications, investigating new hardware resources, and testing out new performance opportunities for AI. She is a postgraduate in Physics with a keen interest in AI/ML and HPC.
José Eduardo Cejudo Grano de Oro (ES)
José Eduardo joined the Europeana Foundation in May 2020 as a Machine Learning Engineer in the R&D department. He holds a Bachelor’s in Physics and a Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His work at Europeana has focused on applying AI for improving data quality and automatic enrichments.
Christoph Schuhmann (DE)
Christoph Schuhmann is an educator and computer scientist who co-founded the German non-profit organization LAION e.V., which strives to democratize state-of-the-art AI research and models. He studied computer science, physics, and psychology at the University of Vienna. Before actively working on AI, he produced the documentary „Schools of Trust“ about schools where kids can learn what they are curious about, without mandatory curricula, grades, or other extrinsic rewards. In the past 10 years, Schuhmann has advised over 50 start-up groups for such schools on education and business matters, completely for free (as his „hobby“), to accelerate the growth of this movement. Nowadays, Schuhmann works as a tenured high school teacher and spends his free time organizing LAION’s community with thousands of scientists, developers, and engineers, who are united by one common goal: making state-of-the-art AI models openly accessible for everyone in the world, as a humanitarian right.