Invited Speakers
Reclaiming Our Voices:
Imagining Community-Led Ai/Ml Practices
Subhashish Panigrahi
Co-Founder of the non-profit O Foundation
Director of the Law for All Initiative at Ashoka
Subhashish Panigrahi founded OpenSpeaks to center community-based media and research. A 2017 batch National Geographic Explorer and a Digital Identity Fellow at Yoti, he has directed over nine non-fiction films, focusing on documentation of low- and medium-resourced languages and community sovereignty and rights. He is a civil society leader and has built open-knowledge and open-internet communities across Asia-Pacific through work at Wikimedia, Mozilla, Internet Society and the Centre for Internet and Society. Subhashish currently heads the Law For All Initiative at Ashoka. Among other media practices, he has built a 65,000-word pronunciation data corpus in his native language, Odia, while assisting other communities.
New Challenges, Old Problems:
AI and Under-resourced Languages
Delyth Prys
School of Arts, Culture and Language at Bangor University (Wales, UK)
Delyth Prys is Professor in the School of Arts, Culture of Language and was until recently Head of Language Technologies at Bangor University. She has been engaged in terminology standardization at BU since 1993, and from 2001 until 2023 led a mixed team of linguists and computer scientists in researching and developing innovative language technologies for under-resourced languages. The main focus of her research is Welsh, together with other Celtic languages, but has also engaged with issues of data sparsity and under-resourced languages, language revitalization through language technologies, and strategic policy matters for minoritized languages which are of global interest. In 2018 Delyth won the Womanspire Building Wales award for her contribution to science and technology. She has published a number of terminology dictionaries and papers on speech and language technologies.