As the NLP community is increasingly covering diverse cultures, researchers face challenges when interacting with diverse communities. Each community has its own norms, modes of communication, and communication constraints. In this panel, we will discuss with experts who have been working with communities in Indonesia, India, and the Middle East. We hope to learn what nuanced challenges they faced that are unique to each community and how they have resolved them. This panel is intended to be an experience-sharing platform that sheds light on the challenges and opportunities in working with diverse communities.
Panelist:
Alham Aji Fikri, MBZUAI is a researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) specializing in multilingual and low-resource languages, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia. His work includes creating culturally relevant multilingual datasets and benchmarks. Additionally, he has worked on improving model efficiency to make NLP technology more accessible. Aji is dedicated to advancing inclusive and community-driven approaches in NLP research and is an active member of the grassroots research community in Southeast Asia.
Mitesh Khapra, IIT Madras is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. He heads the AI4Bharat Research Lab at IIT Madras which focuses on building datasets, tools, models and applications for Indian languages. His research work has been published in several top conferences and journals including TACL, ACL, NeurIPS, TALLIP, EMNLP, EACL, AAAI, etc. He is also a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award (2018), the IITM Young Faculty Recognition Award (2019), the Prof. B. Yegnanarayana Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching (2020) and the Srimathi Marti Annapurna Gurunath Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022).
Sandipan Dandapat, Microsoft. Dr. Sandipan Dandapat is a distinguished AI researcher and practitioner with close to two decades of expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI. He has been with Microsoft India since 2016, serving as a Principal Applied Researcher; he also contributes to academia, serving as an adjunct faculty at IIIT Hyderabad. Prior to Microsoft, he held research and academic roles as a Research Scientist at Xerox Research and as a faculty member at IIT Guwahati. Dr. Dandapat earned his Master degree from IIT Kharagpur and his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Dublin City University. With over 70 publications, Dr. Dandapat's research spans diverse areas of Artificial Intelligence and NLP. He has contributed to top-tier conferences, including ACL and EMNLP, in roles such as senior area chair and area chair.
Vishrav Chaudhary, Meta (Moderator)