Panelists
Introduction: William Allison, UC Berkeley Chief Technology Officer
Pillar 1: Theory
Timothy R. Tangherlini, Professor, Dept of Scandinavian, Assoc. Director, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (He/him)
Tangherlini is professor in the Dept of Scandinavian at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the Graduate Program in Folklore, and acts as the associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He has worked on computational approaches to stories and storytelling over the past three decades and has developed generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives. His recent work focuses on conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as language use in 19th century Danish fiction.
Conversation Leader: Kent Chang (kentkc@berkeley.edu)
Kent Chang, Berkeley School of Information (He/him)
Kent Chang is a PhD student in the School of Information and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research at UC Berkeley. His work explores natural language processing and empirical questions related to literature and culture, and is published in ACL, EMNLP, and Journal of Cultural Analytics, among other places.
Panelists: Catherine Flynn (cflynn@berkeley.edu), Ben Spanbock (spanbock@berkeley.edu), Kimberly Vinall (kvinall@berkeley.edu)
Catherine Flynn, Associate Professor, Department of English (She/her)
Catherine Flynn works on Irish literature and culture in a European avant-garde context and on critical theory. She has published several works on James Joyce and hosts U22 The Centenary Ulysses Podcast. She is also at work with Kent Chang on a website to support her English Department class, AIrish, which uses machine learning and computational analysis to support the study of Irish drama.
Ben Spanbock, PhD; College Writing Programs (He/him)
Ben Spanbock teaches writing, research, and theory courses with UC Berkeley College Writing Programs. He is a 2020-2024 Berkeley Discovery fellow interested in multimodality and AI image creation as a translation practice, authenticity and the digital other, and wholistic pedagogical strategies for contemporary language and expression landscapes.
Kimberly Vinall, Executive Director, Berkeley Language Center (She/her)
Kimberly Vinall (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is the Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Language Center. Her research explores the potential of machine translation tools and other human-like technologies to support language/culture learning, the development of critical digital literacy skills, and understandings of digital citizenship.
Pillar 2: Industry
Featured Speaker: Brock Imel (brock@writer.com)
Brock Imel, Ph.D, Director, Customer Language Engineering at Writer (He/him)
Since finishing his doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures (Linguistics) and Medieval Studies at UCB in 2019, Brock has been with Writer, a leading generative AI company. At Writer, Brock leads the Customer Language Engineering team, which handles customers’ trickiest use cases for generative AI with a mix of prompt engineering and software engineering.
Conversation Leader: Margaret Kolb (kolb.margaret@berkeley.edu)
Margaret Kolb, PhD; College of Engineering (she/her)
Margaret Kolb teaches writing in the College of Engineering. Drawing on her PhD in English Literature from UC Berkeley and BA in abstract mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, she supports students as they translate tough ideas into familiar frameworks. She has also served as a Lecturer in English at UC Berkeley, an instructor at San Quentin Prison, and founded two short story groups, one in Abu Dhabi and the other in San Francisco. Before completing her PhD, she worked as a quantitative analyst in economic research at Bank of America. Find her writing on the intersections of literary and mathematical history in Victorian Studies, Configurations, and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics; her book reviews appear in MAKE Magazine.
Panelists: Cristina Farronato (cfarronato@berkeley.edu), Kayla van Kooten (krvk@berkeley.edu), Kayo Yin (kayoyin@berkeley.edu)
Cristina Farronato, PhD; Department of Italian Studies (She/her)
Cristina Farronato is a Lecturer and Language Program Coordinator in the Department of Italian Studies. Her research interests are in linguistics, second language pedagogy, film, semiotics, and translation. She is currently a fellow in the BLC Lecturer Fellowship program, where she is working on how to implement translation, including machine translation, in the language classroom.
Kayla van Kooten, PhD Student, Department of German (She/her)
Kayla van Kooten is a PhD student in the Department of German, with Designated Emphases in New Media and Dutch Studies. Her current research revolves around questions of multilingualism, translation, migration, digital culture and media. She holds a BA from the University of Washington in Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Kayo Yin, PhD student, Computer Science (She/her)
Kayo Yin is a PhD student at UC Berkeley advised by Jacob Steinhardt and Dan Klein. She currently works on interpretability and sign language processing. Before that, she was a Master's student at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Graham Neubig, and she completed her undergraduate studies at École Polytechnique in 2020.
Pillar 3: Research
Featured Speaker: David Bamman (dbamman@berkeley.edu)
David Bamman, School of Information (He/him)
David Bamman is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where he works in the areas of natural language processing and cultural analytics, applying NLP and machine learning to empirical questions in the humanities and social sciences.
Conversation Leader: Rick Kern (rkern@berkeley.edu)
Rick Kern, French Department (He/him)
Rick Kern is Professor of French and Chair of the French Department. Previously he served for 16 years as Director of the BLC. He teaches courses in French linguistics, language, and foreign language pedagogy, and supervises graduate teaching assistants. His research interests include language acquisition, literacy, and relationships between language and technology.
Panelists: Claudia von Vacano (cvacano@berkeley.edu), Emily Hellmich (eahellmich@berkeley.edu),
Claudia von Vacano, UC Berkeley D-Lab and Digital Humanities (She/her/they/them)
Dr. Claudia von Vacano, at the helm of Berkeley's D-Lab and Digital Humanities, offers over twenty years of experience in education research and policy. Holding advanced degrees from Stanford and UC Berkeley, she specializes in diversity in data science, analyzing hate speech, and pioneering methods for creating debiased, transparent AI.
I pronounce my name like in Spanish. The Spanish pronunciation of "Claudia" can be phonetically written as "KLOW-dee-ah." Here's a breakdown:
"Clau-" is pronounced like "Klow," rhyming with "how" or "now."
"-dia" is pronounced as "dee-ah," where "dee" rhymes with "see" and "ah" is like the "a" in "father."
Emily Hellmich, Berkeley Language Center (She/her)
Emily A. Hellmich (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is the Associate Director of the Berkeley Language Center. Her current research project, in collaboration with Dr. Kimberly Vinall, focuses on developing AI literacies in language learners.