Category Archives: Artificial intelligence

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Just because you aced the SAT, don’t think you can outsmart the shrewdest ruses on the web”, warns Sam Wineburg, professor of Education and History at Stanford and founder of the Stanford History Education Group. The best way for students to avoid getting fooled by …

“In the era of fake news students need to learn to think like professional fact-checkers”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Artificial intelligence (AI) may be negatively affecting the diversity of cultural expression, warns a recent report written by Octavio Kulesz for the UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression. (1) In international forums, says the author, the impact AI …

“Artificial intelligence may be negatively affecting the diversity of cultural expression”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Do the footprints of stereotyping follow us in online environments? Yes, according to cApStAn linguist Emel Ince, and all the more so in the case of “gender-neutral” languages such as her own, Turkish, where there is no male or female distinction in the third person, and …

“Gender bias in machine translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Fixing” the bias problem in AI may simply be a “seductive diversion” from more pressing questions about the technology. Not surprisingly, says the author of this article, many of those sounding the alarm on bias do so with the blessing and support of the big …

“Is solving bias in artificial intelligence distracting us from the real issues?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Here is an interesting take on “automation anxiety” among translators. The author’s approach was to “crawl” content from forum postings and translator blogs in order to compile “a corpus of professional discourses”. He says that, despite the wealth of studies on the issue, most research …

“Automation anxiety and translators”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At the recent TAUS webinar on “geo-linguistic shifts” two leading experts in the field, Lane Green and Nicholas Ostler (see bios below), discussed whether machine translation could one day replace English as the world’s “lingua franca”. The first TAUS debate on this topic between Green …

“Is machine translation taking over from English as the global communication language?”

by Steve Dept – cApStAn partner Will AI allow test development, item banking, item localization, validation and multilingual test delivery to all happen in one integrated environment? The AI behind adaptive translation is not the same as the AI behind item generation, but they can work together to build a robust boiler plate in multiple …

“Offline AI and boiler plate approach in multilingual testing”

  by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Just out: the World Economic Forum’s “The future of jobs” 2018 edition. The report foresees major disruptions to labour markets, but says demand for new roles will offset the decreasing demand for others, with “net job gains” estimated at 58M. Their analysis suggests that …

“Jobs for the future: automation versus augmentation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Tech companies driving the progress in neural machine translation (NMT) tend to fall into the trap of comparing NMT output with human output. Earlier this year Microsoft announced that its NMT had reached parity with human translation, which prompted lively debates in the linguistic ecosystem …

“Recent research looks at the debate on man vs machine translation parity from a new angle”

by Steve Dept – cApStAn partner In some areas, AI may be a hype. Not so for neural machine translation (NMT). On a daily basis, we hear and read about the new threats and opportunities that come with new advances in artificial intelligence (AI). In the field of translation, the advances are real, the opportunities …

“Garbage in, garbage out: feed AI translatable items”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Academia with a vision? Are we breaking the traditional codes that open doors to the realm of the intellectual elite? This blockchain university project is “geographically agnostic,” prioritizing a “borderless” academic community over local or national ties. Lower tuition fees for students? Less red tape? …

“World’s first blockchain university set to become “the Airbnb of degree courses””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In his fascinating 2017 book, “Deep thinking”, Garry Kasparov recounts his career as world chess grandmaster and his 18-year experience in playing chess against computers, culminating in the 1997 match against IBM’s “Deep Blue”. The book offers unique insights into “where machine intelligence ends and …

“Garry Kasparov on chess, AI and the relationship between technology and privacy”