Shows
Lanfrica TalksJosephine Zingani - Empowering Women: The Impact of Bwalo Lathu Collective and the Role of Native Languages in Knowledge SharingThis podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/iPOFj4UUbHs. In this episode, we're joined by Josephine Zingani, an accomplished international development professional with extensive experience in Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL), research, corporate affairs, sustainable development, and philanthropy. She delves into the mission and impact of Bwalo Lathu Collective, exploring how the organization empowers Malawian women and girls through community engagement, mentorship, and economic justice initiatives. We also discuss the crucial role of native languages in mentorship programs, highlighting how using familiar languages can enhance knowledge sharing and foster deeper connections within the community.2024-08-2044 minLanfrica TalksAlexander Visheratin | How a passion project became the state of the art in text and image retrievalThis podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/LxFUB3uvosw. In this episode, we're joined by Alexander Visheratin, AI researcher at Playground AI. In this talk, Alexander Visheratin explores NLLB-CLIP: the current state of multilingual multimodal models, the challenges faced in their development, and his experience creating one of the top CLIP-like models that supports 200 languages.2024-05-2135 min
Lanfrica TalksZainab Abdullahi - Tuberculosis in Africa | Lanfrica TalksIn celebration of World Tuberculosis (TB) Day, our esteemed guest, Zainab Abdullahi, a seasoned Nigerian medical lab scientist with extensive hands-on experience with TB patients, delves into the topic of tuberculosis in Africa. Join us as we examine the challenges posed by TB infection, its prevalence in Africa, and explore its causes, prevention, and treatment options.🎥: https://youtu.be/zEqBPhVRHio“The World TB day is commemorated to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis (TB) and to step up efforts to end the global...2024-03-2418 min
Lanfrica TalksKathryn Kure & Jonathan Poritz - Will "AInt" DDOS The Commons?There is a lot of misunderstanding and hype surrounding AI, fueled by exaggerated marketing and capitalist motives. This episode features Kathryn Kure and Jonathan Poritz as we delve into 'AInt': their critical examination of AI. Together, we explore the harms and exaggerations surrounding AI, including its unsustainable energy consumption, exclusivity, and ethical dilemmas, while also assessing its potential threat to the global creative commons.Watch their original presentation at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fPQz5ZCKqQ&list=PLPDjhzarwzChlePJkWR1iOaoUpCDQYGXt&index=212024-03-141h 14
The AI Artifacts PodcastEpisode 14: Chris Emezue of Lanfrica on AI for low-resource languagesResearcher and Lanfrica founder Chris Emezue joins the season finale of the podcast to discuss the potential for AI to improve translation across low-resource languages — especially in Africa.Brian and Sarah talk about what’s next for the podcast, as well as where AI has been showing up in earnings reports for GAMMA companies over the past week. Listen for more on those stories and a content-themed edition of "Two truths and l’AI" in this week’s episode.Timestamps for this episode:[0:00] Intro[0:16] Welcome[0:35] What’s next for the podcas...2024-02-041h 09
Lanfrica TalksChisom Paula Ogamba: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, language habits, sexual abuse, social media, “chi” / God, spiritual entities and pastorsThis podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/UN1pk2lvME8. In this episode, we're joined by Chisom Paula Ogamba, sociolinguist, discourse analyst, feminist and lecturer. In this episode, we chat with Chisom Ogamba about Nigerian language and cultural habits and how they influence sexual abuse and victim silence in Nigeria.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2024-01-2853 min
Lanfrica TalksBrian Muhia: the struggles of finding your path, mechanistic interpretability, causality, FahamuThis podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/B6ARayTDmz4. In this episode, we're joined by Brian Muhia, co-Founder of Fahamu Inc, and CTO of Equiano Institute’s Causality, Interpretability and Representation Learning group. We talk about the struggles of charting your own path (in a world where paths to success are usually predefined). We round it up with discussions around mechanistic interpretability, causality and deep learning.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-12-1557 min
Lanfrica TalksOpeyemi Osakuade: To what extent do speech models capture the tones of tonal languages?This podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/rV5bUikOe88. In this episode, we're joined by Opeyemi Osakuade, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, engaged in the study of speech models, with a particular focus on low-resourced languages. Opeyemi Lukman discusses the challenges of applying advanced speech representation models, like HuBERT, to tonal languages, using Yorùbá as a case study. The episode explores the strengths and limitations of HuBERT in capturing the nuances of Yorùbá's tonal system.Follow Opeyemi OsakuadeTwitter: https://twitter.com/o_fera...2023-12-0230 min
Lanfrica TalksWhy should we care about AI and healthcare in Africa?This podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/J9CNrw4OevQ. In this episode, we're joined by Lukman Enegi Ismaila, a machine learning engineer and neuroimaging researcher. Lukman discusses his innovative African Biobank solution, tackling the scarcity of medical imagery data for African scientific research. Lukman envisions a collaborative Biobank framework uniting organizations, governments, health centers, academia, and technology institutions. Tune in for a glimpse into the future of transformative health research in Africa!--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-11-1441 min
Lanfrica TalksElizabeth Salesky: The Caffeinated OptimistThis podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/F0Hrhu9-E-M. In this episode, we host Elizabeth Salesky, PhD student at Johns Hopkins University and ☕😀 caffeinated optimist. We discuss building AI evaluation datasets under realistic conditions.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-10-3031 min
Lanfrica TalksFrom Google Summer of Code to Future AI Engineer: Favour James' JourneyThis podcast follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/1wqbhOIX6I4. In this episode, we host Favour James and discuss topics like healthcare patient data digitization, data accessibility and sharing, cancer research at the Google Summer of Code, building datasets, and being an “artificial intelligence engineer” in the future.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-10-1837 min
Lanfrica TalksThe Linguistic Data Consortium at 30: History, Insights and Sharing of African Language ResourcesThis conversation follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/7RYG9X_VE-Y. In this podcast episode, we engage in a comprehensive discussion with Denise DiPersio (the Associate Director at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)), touching upon various subjects, including the history of LDC, its membership structure, the distinctive licensing procedure it employs, the Data Scholarship program, and the how and why of sharing African language resources through LDC.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-10-0330 min
Lanfrica TalksWay With Words, digital equity, community & dataset creation in AfricaThis episode follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/M0X53u9qBpk. In this podcast episode, we delve into a discussion with Graham Morrissey, COO at Way With Words, covering a range of topics: digital equity and inclusivity, the role of data governance, ethics and community, fostering data collaborations, towards a sustainable community of passionate data workers (incentivization, maintaining the drive), opportunities, linking passion and profit oriented burgeoning communities, challenges and considerations for data creation and digital language technologies in Africa.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-09-1944 min
Lanfrica TalksYoshua Bengio: AI for and not against humanity and democracyThis episode follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/JoaZoy4fRPs. In this episode, we delve into a discussion with Professor Yoshua Bengio covering a range of themes like intelligence and setting goals, superhuman AI, AI (mis)alignment, need to ensure AI democracy, governmental steps to be taken, open-source AI, and Bayesian agents. 🎧🎥 Subscribe for more conversations from Lanfrica Talks.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-09-1216 min
Lanfrica TalksJumia Lens, navigating research and deployment, DSN & empowering ML in OAU, Deep Learning Indaba, and the importance of sharing your workThis episode follows from the presentation at https://youtu.be/z1ubta3RBp8. In this episode we chat with Paul Okewunmi where we navigate the synergy of research and deployment in Jumia Lens, explore the DSN OAU community, delve into ML mentorship, the Deep Learning Indaba's global collaboration, and the transformative value of sharing your work.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-08-2129 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #21 | Thoughts on dealing with data access and data use. The tension facing NLP in AfricaIn the latest episode (Ep. 21) of Lanfrica Talks, we had the honor of hosting the seasoned Prof. Vukosi Marivate! 🤩 We delved into some captivating discussions about African language technologies, data sharing, and data governance. Vukosi shared valuable insights on empowering communities in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Moreover, we explored the significance of grounded research with real-life impact, highlighting how technology can truly uplift and transform societies. One of the highlights was chatting about the remarkable Vuk'uzenzele South African Multilingual Corpus and its role in advancing language technologies in Africa. If you're curious about...2023-08-0456 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #20 | Interactive Storytelling & Practical Zero-Shot Text-Speech Alignment using ReadAlong-StudioWe were pleased to host Aidan Pine and Patrick Littell for episode 20 of our Lanfrica Talks. They motivated and presented ReadAlong Studio, an application for performing language zero-shot (L0-shot) text-speech alignment. The ReadAlong Studio Web Interface is designed to create digital interactive "readalong" audio books that highlight words as they are spoken and allow users to replay individual words when clicked. The ReadAlong Studio Web Interface is open-source, user-friendly, prioritizes privacy and data sovereignty, allows for a variety of standard export formats, and is designed to work for the majority of the world's written and spoken languages. Listen...2023-06-281h 12
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #19 | Machine Translation for African Sign LanguagesIn this episode, Shester Gueuwou discusses his award-winning research on machine translation for African sign languages. He describes his journey into this research, including the hype surrounding sign language technologies and its negative impact, as well as the distinction between recognition and translation in sign languages. Sign language translation is an active area of research with the main goal of bridging the communication gap between deaf and hearing individuals. But while there has been significant progress for sign languages from high-income countries, minimal research has been conducted on African sign language translation. --- Send in a voice message...2023-05-3133 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #18 | Meet Babs, your AI personal assistantIn this episode, we host babs.ai, a personalized assistant service that prioritizes productivity and provides support for African users who communicate in low-resource languages. (think ChatGPT but for Africa). Temi Babs, the company's founder, introduces the platform, its unique technologies and services, and their most recent advancements in virtual assistants and chatbots.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-04-1835 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #17 with Batazia | Speech recognition for African languagesIn this episode, Batazia's co-founder and CTO, Ndipabonga Atanga, discussed the development of speech recognition technology for African languages. She explored the exciting developments in speech recognition technology for African languages on mobile applications at Batazia and discussed, among other things, how speech recognition technology is enhancing accessibility to various services such as education, healthcare, and e-commerce.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2023-04-0454 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #16 | AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African LanguagesIn this episode, Ife Adebara takes us through the AfroLID toolkit project, a neural LID toolkit for 517 African languages and varieties. Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world’s 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. AfroLID exploits a multi-domain web dataset manually curated from across 14 language families utilizing five orthographic systems. When evaluated on our blind Test set, AfroLID achieves 95.89 F_1-score. We also compare AfroLID to five existing LID tools that each cover a small number of African languages, fi...2023-03-2229 min
Changelog Master FeedNLP research by & for local communities (Practical AI #205)While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.
The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data...2023-01-0336 min
Practical AINLP research by & for local communitiesWhile at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data...2023-01-0336 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #15 | Language Documentation in Africa. Moving ForwardLanguage Documentation (LD) has gained popularity in African linguistics in recent years, driven by efforts to conserve endangered languages and make language data more accessible. However, the impact of LD on African linguistics research is questionable, as data-driven research is still limited in this field. In this special podcast episode, Dr Emmanuel Ngue Um discusses the role of LD as a new heuristics, not just for data collection but for studying the intersection of social life, places, and objects in language reality. The use of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence can help to re-examine the representation of linguistic diversity...2022-12-2847 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #13 | Unlocking Text Data for Under-Resourced LanguagesIn this episode, we were joined by Shruti Rijhwani, a Research Scientist at Google and recent Ph.D. graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Shruti's thesis focused on improving optical character recognition for endangered languages, and she shared her work on this topic with us.Shruti's broad research interests lie in improving language technologies for under-represented languages and communities. She was awarded the Bloomberg Fellowship to support her Ph.D. research and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Science for her work on building NLP for endangered languages.--- Send in a voice message: https...2022-12-0652 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #12 | Sign-to-speech model for sign language understanding: A case study of Nigerian sign languageWe were joined in this episode by Steven Kolawole, an independent machine learning researcher with the ML Collective, to discuss sign language in sub-Saharan Africa and his sign-to-speech project for sign language comprehension in Nigeria.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-11-1640 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #11 | NLP for Ghanaian languages with Lawrence Adu-GyamfiIn today's episode, Lawrence Adu-Gyamfi who is the Director of Products and Research Scientist at GhanaNLP joined us, to talk about his personal research journey, his company's motivation, the scope of his work, and some of its contributions to the Natural Language Processing community in Ghana to date.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-11-0838 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #10 | Modeling language from raw speech in an unsupervised manner by Gašper BegušGašper Beguš an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley where he directs the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab. Before coming to Berkeley, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, and before that he graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard. His research focuses on developing deep-learning models for speech data. More specifically, he trains models to learn representations of spoken words from raw audio inputs. He combines machine learning and statistical modeling with neuroimaging and behavioral experiments to better understand how neural networks learn internal representations in speech and how humans le...2022-10-1855 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #9 | Adversarial Text-to-Speech for low-resource languages by Ashraf Hatim ElneimaEven though there is a data shortage for African languages, it is still possible to create effective speech models for them. Learn how to improve voice synthesis models for low-resource languages by utilizing the high-frequency similarities between languages.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-10-1121 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #8 | Visual grounding of inter-lingual word embeddings by Wafaa MohammedMachines cannot fully comprehend people if they simply use text; humans do not merely need text to comprehend the world and interact with one another. Learn about the exciting field of visual grounding in this session which helps models/machines comprehend our environment more effectively, particularly in the context of African languages and cultures.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-10-0314 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #7 | Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resource African Languages by Shamsuddeen H. MuhammadShamsuddeen is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Porto, Portugal. He is also a faculty member at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. His research focuses on NLP for low-resource African languages. Currently, he is interested in classification tasks such as sentiment analysis and hate speech detection. Shamsuddeen is an active member of the Masakhane NLP group and co-founder of HausaNLP.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-09-2732 min
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #6 | Delivering Success in Natural Language Processing Projects by Cynthia ThinwaCynthia Thinwa presented to us her "NLP toolbox" - a framework that shows you in great detail how to design meaningful NLP projects for the real world. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have grown in prominence between the late 20th and early 21st century. However, though algorithms are increasingly controlling our day-to-day lives, they are created and managed only by a very privileged few. The aim of the 5-part series is therefore to give you the necessary skills in NLP in order to build meaningful projects with it. This talk is for everyone - whether a beginner or expert in...2022-09-2038 min
Access 2 Perspectives – Conversations. All about Open Science CommunicationLanfrica - the hub for African language resources - A conversation with Chris EmezueChris Emezue is a researcher and the founder of Lanfrica, an online resource centre that catalogues, archives and links African language resources in order to mitigate the difficulty encountered in discovering African works.
His research areas of interest include machine/deep learning, reinforcement learning (for games and neural machine translation), natural language processing (speech and language processing).
Chris is also a Machine Learning Researcher in NLP. As an African NLP researcher, he is working to promote African languages in Speech and Language Processing.
More details at access2perspectives.org/2022/09/a-conversation-with-chris-emezue/
Host...2022-09-181h 00
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #5 | Lingala Speech Translation (LiSTra) by Salomon K. KabongoI am a doctoral candidate in computer science at Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH) and a research assistant at the AI Future Lab of the L3S research center and the Data Science and Digital Libraries research group at TIB. My academic background includes an MSc in Mathematics Science from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and an MSc from the African Master in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) (University of Ghana) sponsored by Google and Facebook through the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. https://skabongo.github.io/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.c...2022-09-121h 09
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #4 | AfricaNLP, The Next Disruptor: by Hatem Haddad and Chayma FouratiAI is the pioneering end of computer science. Data and AI are merging into a synergistic relationship, where AI is useless without data. Africa has over 2000 languages; however, those languages are still called “under-represented languages” in the existing Natural Language Processing ecosystem. This talk is about discussing the situation of African NLP by presenting case studies of how to collect data, preprocess data, and apply deep learning models. The case studies are based on text and speech processing applied to different African languages.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-08-301h 03
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #3 | Building Language Technologies for Kinyarwanda by Isaac Manzi & Kelia MugenziOur speakers (Isaac Manzi and Mugenzi Kelia) shared their journey and insights in developing Kinyarwanda language technologies (including machine translation, text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition) with FAIR Forward and other open-source communities.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-08-161h 02
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #2 | Building African Voices by Perez OgayoPerez Ogayo is a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Language Technologies Institute(LTI) where she is focusing on low-resource natural language processing. Her interests in NLP are multilingual machine translation, speech synthesis and recognition, and NLP for endangered languages. She is a researcher at Masakhane working on Luo and Kiswahili.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lanfrica-talks-podcast/message2022-08-021h 05
Lanfrica TalksLanfrica Talks #1 | Leveraging NLP for Education at Linguistics Justice LeagueLinguistics Justice League's (LJL) mission is to build fun and engaging bilingual educational content and apps for language learners who speak low-resource languages by leveraging Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Gamification. Language proficiency is the foundation for higher-order learning. It is scientifically proven that leveraging a person's strength in their native language accelerates the learning of another language. Unfortunately, most commercial products ignore Low Resource Languages mainly spoken outside of economically advanced countries. In this talk, Subha discusses the work they are doing at LJL to drive awareness and increase understanding of international cultures; she talks about EduLang...2022-07-1959 min
Localization TodayLanfrica launches catalog of African language resourcesLanfrica, an online catalog of African language resources specialized for linguists and natural language processing (NLP) specialists, has launched after months of development.2022-02-2203 min