Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Date and Time:
Oct. 22, 2024: 10:30 am – 11:30 am (JST)
Venue: Online and Open Space at the RIKEN AIP Nihonbashi office*
*The Open Space; AIP researchers are only available.

TITLE: Multimodal, Multilingual Generative AI: From Multicultural Contextualization to Empathetic Reasoning

SPEAKER: Dr. Nancy F. Chen (A*STAR)

ABSTRACT:
We will share about MeraLion (Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning In One Network), our generative AI efforts in Singapore’s National Multimodal Large Language Model Programme. Speech and audio information is rich in providing more comprehensive understanding of spatial and temporal reasoning in addition to social dynamics that goes beyond semantics derived from text alone. Cultural nuances and multilingual peculiarities add another layer of complexity in understanding human interactions. In addition, we will draw use cases in education to highlight research endeavors, technology deployment experience and application opportunities.

Bio:
Nancy F. Chen is an A*STAR fellow, who leads the Multimodal Generative AI group, heads the Artificial Intelligence for Education (AI4EDU) programme at I2R (Institute for Infocomm Research) and is a principal investigator at CFAR (Centre for Frontier AI Research), A*STAR. Dr. Chen’s recent work in large language models have won honors at ACL 2024, including Area Chair Award and Best Paper Award for Cross-Cultural Considerations in Natural Language Processing. Dr. Chen consistently garners best paper awards for her AI research applied to diverse applications. Examples include IEEE ICASSP 2011 (forensics), APSIPA 2016 (education), SIGDIAL 2021 (social media), MICCAI 2021 (neuroscience), and EMNLP 2023 (healthcare). Multilingual spoken technology from her team has led to commercial spin-offs and has been deployed at Singapore’s Ministry of Education to support home-based learning. Dr. Chen has supervised 100+ students and staff. She has won professional awards from USA National Institute of Health, IEEE, Microsoft, P&G, UNESCO, and L’Oréal.

She servers as Program Chair of NeurIPS 2025, APSIPA Board of Governors (2024-2026), IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2024), Program Chair of ICLR 2023, Board Member of ISCA (2021-2024), and is honoured as Singapore 100 Women in Tech (2021). Prior to A*STAR, she worked at MIT Lincoln Lab while pursuing a PhD at MIT and Harvard.

For more info: http://alum.mit.edu/www/nancychen.

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