Daniel Whitenack

In my main position, as a data scientist at SIL International, I work on expanding language possibilities with AI. Practically this includes applying recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to low resource and multilingual contexts. We work on things like spoken language identification, multilingual dialogue systems, machine translation, and translation quality estimation. You can find out more about these efforts at ai.sil.org.

38 min Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community. This week we discuss BERT, a new method of pre-training language representations from Google for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Then we tackle Facebook’s Horizon, the first open source reinforcement learning platform for large-scale products and services. We also address synthetic data, and suggest a few learning resources. 38 min

You might not know, but there are currently 7,117 languages spoken in the world. Not dialects, but living languages! However, much of the world's digital media is available in only a couple dozen languages, and translation platforms like Google Translate only support around 100 languages. This reality means that there are billions of people around the world that are marginalized due to a lack of timely access to information.