I2SC Lecture Series (Recording): Asmelash Teka Hadgu (Low-resource NLP, Lesan AI / DAIR), Beyond AI Hype: Building Machine Learning Systems that Serve Communities

Date: April 25, 2025

Abstract:

Technological advancement, particularly Artificial Intelligence, is often accompanied by significant hype and grand promises. But who do these technologies serve? I will motivate this talk by conducting a reality check of current technologies, such as chatbots, social media platforms, search engines, and knowledge bases for languages spoken by millions in the Horn of Africa. Drawing from hands-on experience, I will then explore the development of machine learning systems for underrepresented languages, focusing on Machine Translation and Automatic Speech Recognition for Amharic and Tigrinya. These case studies offer insight into the technical and social challenges involved, as well as the broader implications for the communities these technologies are intended to serve. I will conclude by discussing how we evaluate machine learning systems. Evaluation is central to defining scientific progress in the field, with benchmarks playing a critical role. However, benchmarks can also be strategically manipulated or misused. I will highlight how these issues manifest in practice and what they reveal about the incentives and priorities driving current AI research.

You can watch the recording of the talk below.


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