The Death of a Language

USC students from the CAIS++ student organization have created a variety of novel projects under the mission statement of "artificial intelligence for social good". In this episode, Kyle interviews Zane and Leena about the Endangered Languages Project.

Guests

Zane Durante: Zane Durante participated in USC's CAIS++ student AI organization and worked on using machine learning to help reconstruct an endangered Northern Italian dialect; he later continued AI research at Stanford University.

Leena Mathur: I am a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS) in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). My research focuses on foundations of multimodal social intelligence in AI systems across embodiments, with applications to support human health and well-being. I work with Yonatan Bisk and Louis-Philippe Morency, and my PhD research is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the SoftBank Group-Arm Fellowship. Previously, I worked at Google DeepMind as a Student Researcher, and I interned at Robust.AI, where I worked on perception and human-robot interaction for collaborative mobile robots. I earned an MS from CMU SCS/LTI and a BS in Computer Science, BA in Cognitive Science, and BA in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. I am fortunate to have worked with wonderful research mentors — Maja Matarić at USC's Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center, Leila Takayama at Robust.AI, Khalil Iskarous from USC Linguistics, Ralph Adolphs at Caltech, Michael Shindler at UC Irvine, and Rémi Lebret at EPFL. I am grateful for my undergraduate experience learning from USC's AI community and my 4 years leading and growing the engineering school's student AI organization CAIS++, mentored by Bistra Dilkina from USC's Center for AI in Society. I now serve on the CAIS++ alumni board.