Colloquium Series Videos
We're thrilled to announce that videos from this semester's colloquium talk series are now available on YouTube!
This semester, we featured three incredible speakers who shared their exemplary work on improving access to opportunities for disadvantaged and marginalized groups.
Swapna Reddy, co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), leads an organization with over 600,000 asylum-seeking members from 175+ countries. In her talk, Swapna discussed the opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned from engaging with a large member base to drive meaningful change through participatory decision-making and collective action.
Melissa Dell, the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, is renowned for her contributions to economic thought and knowledge. In her talk, Melissa presented a novel approach to OCR using a contrastively trained vision encoder, highlighting its potential to enhance the representativeness of digital archives by enabling accurate OCR for low-resource document collections.
David Adelani, a DeepMind Academic Fellow at University College London and incoming Assistant Professor at McGill School of Computer Science, is renowned for his research in natural language processing (NLP) for under-resourced African languages. In his talk, Dr. Adelani presented an analysis of four popular large language models on various NLP tasks across 60 African languages, highlighting the significant performance gaps compared to high-resource languages and the need for focused efforts to address these disparities.