Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for EMNLP 2009 and ACL 2011, and a general chair for NAACL 2015 and *SEM 2019. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2013), and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).

DETAILS:
Why Is AI W.E.I.R.D. And Shouldn't Be This Way

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advancements in AI, with language and vision models that have enabled progress in numerous applications and opened the door to the integration of AI in areas such as communication, transportation, healthcare, and arts. Yet, many of these models and their corresponding datasets are W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and they are reflective of a small fraction of the population.(*) In this talk, I will show some of the limitations and lack of representation of current AI models, and highlight the need for cross-cultural language and vision models that can capture the diversity of behaviors, beliefs, and language expressions across different groups. I will also explore ways in which we can address these limitations by developing models that are re-centered around people and their unique characteristics.

(*) W.E.I.R.D. is an acronym widely used in psychology to indicate the limitations of many of the studies carried out in the field