July 1, 2022

Join us for a live webinar

Friday Night AI:

“Language is everywhere — and AI models of language are not far behind“
Free and open to the public

Invited speaker: Prof. Steve Abney and Ian Stewart
Organizer: Michigan AI Lab, in collaboration with the Ann Arbor District Library
Moderator: Prof. Rada Mihalcea

We use language to talk to one another or to tell stories; to express happiness or feelings of frustration; to teach or give advice; and for so much more. While language has always been uniquely human, recent decades have witnessed significant advances in the development of AI systems that process, classify, or generate language, leading to numerous applications that we use on a daily basis — think Siri and Alexa, Google search, Zoom transcription, and more. 

Join us to learn more about computational models of language, how they work, how they attempt to ‘understand’ or ‘create’ language, how they are used in applications, and what are some of their major limitations.

About:

Steve Abney is an Associate Professor in the U-M Department of Linguistics. His area of research is computational linguistics, which encompasses language technology (machine translation, speech recognition, information extraction), digital linguistics, the language part of artificial intelligence, and computational psycholinguistics. 

Ian Stewart is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, working in MIDAS and CSE. He earned a PhD in Human-Centered Computing in 2020 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ian develops natural language processing methods for personalized text generation, social bias detection, and other social science applications.

Prof. Rada Mihalcea, Director Michigan AI, will moderate the discussion.

No registration is required.

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89401794902?pwd=2RNXAJGUYkWDlOcvo-WsD6cblqW9R3.1