Author: Sara E Miyabe

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New team member: Shaoxiong Ji

Hello,

My name is Shaoxiong Ji. This year, I started as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, working on high-performance language technology at the Language Technology research group led by Prof. Jörg Tiedemann.

My research focuses on multilingual NLP and machine translation. I will be working with some NLP resource development such as large-scale data and and train big models and knowledge distillation models with the HPLT project. I am also interested in some other topics such as modular neural networks, zero-shot cross-lingual tasks, and other low-resource problems.

I did my Ph.D. at Aalto University under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Pekka Marttinen in the Machine Learning for Healthcare research group.  My Ph.D. thesis is about natural language processing for healthcare applications. During my doctoral candidature, I was a visiting researcher with Prof. Hinrich Schütze at the University of Munich (LMU Munich, Germany) and Dr. Mikko Peltola at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL, Finland). Prior to my doctoral candidature, I did MPhil research with Prof. Xue Li and Prof. Helen Zi Huang at the University of Queensland (UQ Australia) working on NLP applications for social good. I did visiting research with Assoc. Prof. Erik Cambria at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), where I worked on sentiment analysis especially emotion recognition in conversations.

I also spent a half year as a research assistant and a visiting scholar with Dr. Guodong Long and Dr. Shirui Pan at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS Australia), working on federated learning and mobile internet applications.

I am happy to join the group and discuss more about interesting topics. Thank you for your time and for reading my introduction and looking forward to meeting you!

Best,
Shaoxiong

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New team member: Ona de Gibert Bonet


Hello everyone!

My name is Ona de Gibert Bonet and I am thrilled to introduce myself as a new PhD student in the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. I joined the Helsinki-NLP group in January this year.

To tell you a bit about my background, I was born and raised in Barcelona. I received a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literature from the University of Barcelona (2016) and earned a M.S. in Language Analysis and Processing from the University of the Basque Country (2018).

I am passionate about Machine Translation (MT), which is what led me to pursue a PhD in Language Technology. I am excited to join the research team led by Jörg Tiedemann, where I will be exploring MT for low-resourced languages with a focus on knowledge distillation. I believe that this research area has great potential to make a positive impact on the democratization of MT, broadening its accessibility, and I am eager to contribute to this work.

Apart from my academic interests, I love dancing ballet and lindy hop. In my free time, you can often find me doing very Finnish things: knitting or in the sauna. Both activities help me relax and clear my mind after a long day of research.

Thank you for taking the time to read my presentation, and I cannot wait to see what this academic journey has in store for us all. If you see me around campus, please don’t hesitate to say hello!

Best,
Ona

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FCAI Research Insight Event May 6, 2019

FCAI hosted Research Insight Event at Aalto university. The purpose of the day was to bring together FCAI’s academics and partners to discuss shared problems and to workshop future research ideas for the center.

Found in translation (FoTran) was presented by Jörg Tiedemann.
“Natural Language Processing is not only an important component of intelligent systems that interact with users but also develops into a core discipline of AI that aims at learning world knowledge from human communication. The goal of our research is to use translations to pick up essential semantics of natural language. Combining multilingual signals with multimodal grounding we aim at improved models for natural language understanding.”