Public examination of Aarne Talman’s PhD thesis

Aarne TalmanAnother FoTran team member, Aarne Talman will defend the doctoral dissertation entitled “Towards Natural Language Understanding: Developing and Assessing Approaches and Benchmarks

The public examination will take place in the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, on 23 February 2024 at 13:00 in the lecture hall at Unioninkatu 33, (room 303). Assistant Professor Vered Shwartz, University of British Columbia, will serve as the opponent, and Jörg Tiedemann as the custos.

The defense will also be streamed on Unitube: https://video.helsinki.fi/unitube/live-stream.html?room=l44

The dissertation will be published in the series Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis (http://hdl.handle.net/10138/568130)

[press release]

Public examination of Raúl Vázquez’ PhD thesis

Our FoTran team member Raúl Vázquez will defend the doctoral dissertation entitled “Representation Learning in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

The public examination will take place in the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, on 17 November 2023 at 10:00 in the lecture hall at Unioninkatu 33, (room 303). Senior Researcher Dr. Cristina España i Bonet, DFKI, will serve as the opponent, and Jörg Tiedemann as the custos.

The defense will also be streamed on Unitube: https://video.helsinki.fi/unitube/live-stream.html?room=l44

The dissertation will be published in the series Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis (http://hdl.handle.net/10138/566538)

Helsinki-NLP is busy at the FCAI AI day

The language technology group from Helsinki has substantial presence at the AI day organized by the Finnish Center for AI (FCAI). Check out the program and see our presentations about

 

 

Come and see us at the presentations and posters!

New team member: Joseph Attieh

Hello everyone!

My name is Joseph Attieh, and I’m thrilled to introduce myself as the newest member joining the Language Technology research group led by Prof. Jörg Tiedemann. As I embark on my PhD journey, my primary focus will be on Green NLP, particularly in the areas of knowledge distillation and modularization.

My academic journey started in Lebanon, where I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. Afterwards, I pursued a double master’s degree at Aalto University in Finland and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. During the course of my studies, I’ve had the privilege of conducting research at EPFL, where I delved into decentralized and distributed systems. My journey then took me to Munich, where I worked with BMW, navigating the intricate world of data analytics. More recently, I’ve worked at Huawei Technologies in Helsinki, starting as an Automatic Speech Recognition researcher and later transitioning to a full-time NLP researcher role. The challenges and discoveries during these experiences solidified my decision to further my studies and research, leading me to pursuing this exciting PhD opportunity.

Outside the world of algorithms and research papers, I cherish my time swimming, a love I owe to the Mediterranean vibes of my Lebanese homeland. Roller and ice skating are my go-to escapes. And when I’m not in the research lab or on the rink, you might find me binge watching a TV show or reading a book, guilty pleasures I wholeheartedly embrace.

I am excited to join the research team and am looking forward to the collaborations, challenges, and innovations ahead. I am eager to contribute to the team’s vision and to further the advancements in the field of Green NLP. The research in Green NLP has the potential to revolutionize the way NLP models are built and used. I am eager to contribute to this vision and collaborate with the brilliant minds here.

Thank you for taking a moment to get to know me.  I am excited to embark on this shared journey of discovery, challenges, and innovation with all of you.

Best regards,

Joseph Attieh

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

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

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.”