Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Speaker: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
Bio:
"I am a Computational Social Scientist, working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Society, with a special focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). I am currently a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research. I also hold a Research Affiliate position at the Stanford SPARQ institute. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. I obtained my PhD from Columbia University in 2015.
I read, think, write, and speak about employing NLP techniques for socially beneficial applications, as well as investigating (and mitigating) ethical and fairness failures in NLP models. An overarching theme of my recent research is cross-cultural considerations in answering these questions. I engage in both critical questioning of the underlying assumptions of ethics and fairness research that may fail in non-Western geo-cultural contexts, as well as building methods and resources to meaningfully address these issues in global contexts. My prior research includes building scalable ways to identify and address large-scale societal issues such as racial disparities in policing, workplace incivility, gender bias and stereotypes, and abusive behavior online. To this end, I collaborate with researchers in Machine Learning and NLP, as well as social scientists and practitoners from diverse backgrounds.
I served as a Diversity and Inclusion co-chair for the ACL 2020 conference. I often serve as an Area Chair for the Ethics and NLP and Computational Social Sciences tracks in NLP conferences. I also co-organize the annual Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) (usually co-located with *ACL/EMNLP conferences)."
To obtain the Zoom link for this event, please see the event announcements from MLFL on the college email lists or contact wenlongzhao [at] cs.umass.edu (subject: MLFL%20Zoom%20Link) (Wenlong Zhao).