Jade Abbott
@alienelf
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11,314
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4,602
Media
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Statuses
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CTO and Co-founder @lelapaai | Co-founder @masakhanenlp | Bassist @fmfyband | 80% of my tweets are a joke 🌍🇿🇦 🏳️🌈. Stop Apartheid & Genocide 🇵🇸
Johannesburg, South Africa
Joined November 2012
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Send us removal request.
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Pinned Tweet
In a month, things will quieten down and people will forget
#BlackLivesMatter
and so will you.
Here are some strategies I've learnt on the never-ending journey to make being an ally a way of life
👇✨ A Thread on being a Consistent Ally ✨👇 (1/n)
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My first tattoo will probably be:
tar -xvzf file.tar.gz
Then I'll never need to look it up again
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"Sorry about my English" is an apology no one should feel necessary to give.
We should normalize that English is not everyone's first language.
We should downplay the importance of good grammar.
It serves as a colonial gate-keeping mechanism
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I will no longer be speaking
@panafriconai
due to the guest of honour: Ethiopian prime minister. The seige of Tigray is an insane violation of human rights & has hurt members of my African AI community. I hurt for them & I cant see past that. I am sorry ☮️🕊️🌍
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This is my favourite thing on the internet.
It combines 2 of utmost joys: Data and
@bbpoltergiest
😱
Thanks
@Zelios1
for finding it. Thanks
@OppenheimerEvan
for doing it 👑
#shitshow
😻
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I went to a uni you've never heard of 🌆
I don't have a PhD 👩🏽🎓
I've never worked for a FAANG company🤷♀️
I work at a company you don't know 🐇 in a country you're afraid to visit 🇿🇦
But it seems 7000 of y'all want to read things I say 😱
And that is nice to know 🌺
Thanks ☺️
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Some bloke tried to hit on us last night. He asked us how we all met. So I whipped a research paper out of my bag & proceeded to drunkardly explain it to him.
He was not ready 🤣
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Today I gave my Responsible NLP lecture to my NLP class which I have been excitedly preparing for, for a while now.
My student
@ArnolFokam
immediately made some memes and they're so great so I have to share
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There is a fundamental problem that most organizations doing ML fail to address.
Data are Dynamic. Datasets are not.
The entire field has been built around the 2nd. It's one of the many reasons the field is so messed up
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ML world! 👩🏽💻
1. What's your strategy for picking papers to read? 📃
2. Is your paper reading adhoc or do you have a reading routine? 📔
3. What tools aid your paper reading? 🔧🔨
4. Do you ever feel fatique from paper reading? 😩
5. Do you feel guilty reading other topics? 😫
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Hi, I'm a ML engineer. You might know me from my bangers "Those models aren't comparable", "why are the Nvidia drivers borked again?" and the chart topping "You can't deploy an jupyter notebook into production!"
Hi, I'm a remote engineer. You might know me from my bangers "sorry I'll mute, there is someone with a leaf blower outside", "can you zoom now" and the chart topping "did I tell you, I work remotely?"
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I'm tired of ML.
What's a cool field to dabble in for a while?
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This is just a penis size contest between the tech giants now
"My LM is bigger than yours"
🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
Any actually interesting NLP news? 🤷♀️
#NLProc
The new language model our teams built is the largest and most powerful one ever created – a milestone with the promise to transform how technology understands and assists us.
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This has been a long and hard decision for me. The war is complex, as all are, but there were too many people who I care about who had to escape Tigray, who still have family trapped their with no idea how they are, without contact for multiple years
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It's official. I severely dislike online conferences. It feels like work. I feel tired most of the time, timezones not helping. It's not the usual joyful break it used to be. I miss people and it feels lonely. 😣
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For real, why is generative image stuff getting so much funding? What is the business model?
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When I started working in NLP, it was Computer Vision's less popular little sibling. I liked that.
Now it's THE CENTRE OF ALL THE HYPE and that makes me so tired.
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I've come to realize how truly wide and valuable my skills & experiences are. Winning the battle against imposter syndrome😭
Very few people are aware of even a % of the things I have worked on, or have any idea what my strengths are - I wear many hats after all 🎩🎓🤠🥳⛑️👒🧢
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Calling all African NLPers!
Goal: Let's publish a paper with NMT baselines for all African languages
Slides
Instructions
Data
Let's put African NMT on the map!
🌍🔥💗
@DeepIndaba
#DLIndaba2019
#SautiYetu
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Excited to announce that the Masakhane Research Foundation that aims to support the
@MasakhaneNLP
community has been officially registered in Kilifi, Kenya 🇰🇪🤩🌍🌸
2022 of to a high note!
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Hey African machine learning community!
I have a talk this week where I want to brag about our community
If you're in ML in Africa, tell me what you're busy researching/building.
Let's make this a thing! Hash tag with
#MLinAfrica
@alliance4ai
@DeepIndaba
@DataScienceNIG
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I have few small hopes for big tech. One was that Google continued to support the vital work of
@timnitGebru
. It indicated a willingness for hard self-reflection on their outputs - A system that was successfully fighting itself & improving as a result.
There's that one gone 💔
Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer speak.
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I won't be attending
#NeurIPS
this year but I wrote this about strategies for first time attendees of the conference, after my first time (of largely screwing it up and how to not do that again 😅)
Hope it's useful 😊✨
“How to NeurIPS”
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"Good grammar" is not important. We can communicate without "good grammar" - we just need "good enough grammar". Our ability to understand is way more powerful that we give it credit.
English grammar is seen as a proxy to intelligence far too often - that is ABSURD
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So, it looks like I'm teaching the honours NLP course
@WitsUniversity
this semester, and I have big plans!
My first step is to create the course outline 💪
Please share with me your favourite NLP courses for inspiration and any tips on NLP pedagogy! 🤗
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It's happening! I'm super excited to introduce y'all to
@LelapaAI
~ AI for Africans, by Africans, solving African problems 🤩
Lelapa has raised $2.5M from
@AtlanticaVC
,
@Mozilla
Ventures, and angels like
@kbeguir
and
@JeffDean
Read more here 👇 or at
Hello world 🌍♥️
"Lelapa is building a research lab to serve African businesses & nonprofits, with the hope that locally grown algorithms can better serve communities."
Thanks
@kharijohnson
@WIRED
for telling our story 🤩
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So, today is a day for African NLP
@siminyu_kat
and team, among all the other crazy amazing things they're making happen managed to submit an
#AfricaNLP
workshop to
@iclr_conf
AND GOT ACCEPTED 🤩🌍
#ICLR2020
in Addis, HERE WE COME
💃🤩
#SautiYetu
#Masakhane
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Honoured to have just made MITs 35 under 35 (I turn 35 next month) 🫶 Thank you to everyone on my journey
Building with a team of winners at
@LelapaAI
<> Jade Abbott | MIT Technology Review
#AfricanAIWeWant
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For those of you abroad who believe
#BlackLivesMatter
, there is a massacre happening in Lagos right now. The military have open fired on protestors who have been protesting police brutality. It appears it was pre-meditated.
#EndSARS
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How to say "No" to things you believe in, but don't have time for? 🤔
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Laughing at how my 2nd most cited paper is one that wasn't published because it wasn't "novel enough" 🤣 The goal of that paper was to spur research in African NLP, by highlighting the societal problems & proposing a 1st step: open reproducible science
✨ Impact != "Novelty" ✨
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It's ma birthday 🌻 I'm now in the 30+ category 🙃
For my birthday, I request replies of the song/album that got you through 2020 thus far 🍻💕🌺
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Something that always bothers me about working more on the MLOps/production/product-end of ML, is that my maths brain-muscles don't get enough regular practice.
What are your strategies for keeping the ML-relevant basics fresh? How much time do you dedicate to this?
#ICLR2020
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Solidarity to my friends & collaborators in Nigeria 🇳🇬 & in Namibia 🇳🇦 We stand with you
Things are not okay right now, but your voices are heard. I hope for your safety in these times. Let us know where we can help
#SARSMUSTEND
#ShutItAllDownNamibia
#PoliceBrutalityMustEnd
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I'm humbled & excited to be presenting the progress of
@MasakhaneMt
at
@iclr_conf
AfricaNLP workshop next week ♥️✨
🌍 Machine Translation for Africa🌍
Paper:
Code:
Website:
Artwork by:
@Ke_neil_we
😍
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Are African cities too hard to optimize or did y'all just not care?
Exciting results from our partnership with
@googlemaps
! Using advanced Graph Neural Networks we were able to improve the accuracy of ETAs in major cities across the world by up to 50%
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Microsoft just opened dev & research offices in Nigeria and Kenya
AWS was started in and has a massive office in South Africa
Google Ghana is growing
He's making excuses. Companies that run on the African continent without hiring African devs make me ill
Honestly, this guy🙄
Jumia’s CEO Sacha Poignonnec says says Africa doesn’t have enough developers that’s why they don’t hire them locally. 🤔
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App idea: Tinder, except solely to find people nearby who want to go have brunch
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Feeling extra "fuck you" to D&I lip service today. 😡 It's always "warm fuzzies" and fitting into the system
D&I should be renamed anti-oppression. Maybe then we can tackle it properly
Don't @ me
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We've been challenged by
@ruha9
to read at least one of these before next year's
@DeepIndaba
(Her talk is too unbelievable to live tweet during it. I'll give more updates for rest of community later)
Let's read them all
#DLIndaba2019
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
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Just did my first NLP lecture at
@WitsUniversity
Excited to have 35 students show up to the "live" lecture, instead of just watching the recording :D
Very excited to have lots of participation, asking questions about NLP for African languages 🌍💫💗
#NLProcWits2021
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Summary of the "ML for Developers" track
- ML is more than jupyter notebooks 📒
- We must build ML models responsibly (Every presentation brought this up!)
- ML is iterative (you can data science in sprints!)
- MLOps is possible.
- Explainability & privacy is important 💥✨
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It's an honour and humbling to be featured with all these fantastic humans 🤗 Thank you
@Inspiring50SA
and congratulations to ALL the winners ✨🎉🥳 You're so inspiring and I cant wait to meet y'all in person one day
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He left soon after. I highly recommend this tactic and I'm never leaving the house without a research paper again 🤣
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Excited to invite NLP researchers working in African Languages (or relevant NLP techniques) to submit to the
@iclr_conf
workshop in Addis:
"AfricaNLP - Unlocking Local Languages" 🌍
2-page extended abstracts!
Deadline: 14th Feb
#ICLR2020
#masakhane
🔥
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Google just digging this hole as deep as possible. Like just STAAAAP already. You keep making it worse
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A new employee who'd just joined the company said:
"I wanted to meet you because I've heard you're actually good. Because in my experience women devs aren't good" 🤮
Grateful to my (male 👏🏽) colleague who shutdown that bullshit immediately.
#womenintech
true story.
A colleague invited me to a party.
One guy intro'd himself and asked me what I do.
Me: I'm a developer.
Him: Uh 'developer' can mean a lot of things. What do you *actually* do?
My colleague had to back me up and I explain that I do program at work.
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@truthandfiction
12th largest Jewish community in the world is in SA. And the majority of white anti-apartheid leaders were Jewish. We are here, doing business, living lives.
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We compared Africa-centric Models to OpenAI’s GPT3.5 for isiZulu and here were our results 🤯 🌍
The translations are hilarious, but in truth quite terrifying 😂 😱
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Tired of reading about the US election all the time? Feel there is more to the world? Well, there is!
Some excellent African publications about African politics, research & literature:
-
@africaarguments
-
@africasacountry
-
@thecontinent_
-
@africaiknow
-
@brittlepaper
🌍🤩
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I see
@aclmeeting
@emnlp2020
and the other ACL conferences are still reporting to be in person 2021.
We were thinking of submitting another AfricaNLP workshop for next year. So, being African, we must pick where we want to submit to based on VISA policy 🤷🏾♀️
Let's take a look /1
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The sheer number of requests for Masters, PhD & Internship recommendation letters that I'm receiving from
@MasakhaneNLP
participants makes my year 🤩💪🌍🌈
Slow, consistent, considerate grassroots efforts result in slow but real societal change
#WeBuildTogether
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I'm going to put it out there: About a year ago I hospitalised myself due to a mental breakdown triggered by the field of large language models. No jokes
Opening twitter at the moment is actually a nightmare
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Just saw this article about "Minimum requirements to pass matric" in 🇿🇦
Why is Afrikaans one of the "must-haves"? One could argue English is the language of global interaction so it's useful practically, but Afrikaans? Why is isiZulu not on that list?
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I'll be speaking at
@QConSF
in San Francisco this November. 😊🎉
I'm talking about all the ✨surprises✨ ML systems have in store for you when taking them to prod 👩🏽💻
If you're in SF, would love to meetup and hang. I'll also be there 2 weeks before to attend
@TensorFlowWorld
"
#ML
's Hidden Tasks: A Checklist for Developers When Building ML Systems". This talk will bring to light my story of how I learned about the unexpected, and what tools helped us through that.
@alienelf
@teamretrorabbit
#QConSF
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Feeling very disenchanted by tech and ML as a whole. It's usually round about this time of year I attend the
@DeepIndaba
which invigourates my soul again
Missing the
@DeepIndaba
family 💕✨
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To organisations/research groups creating internships with the aim of empowering African students 🌍:
There are very few students in Africa who have the opportunity to do PhDs, so you're going to need to consider Master's students or even undergrad to make an impact 🤷🏽♀️
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1/ Tomorrow
@iclr_conf
begins. Those of you attending please do join us at TOMORROW the AfricaNLP 🌍 workshop, where we'll be putting AfricaNLP on the map 💪🏾👩🏾💻 🎉
There is a wonderful line-up of speakers, posters and topics
#ICLR2020
#AfricaNLP2020
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🪲Excited to present the publication for InkubaLM!
-> 🤗 :
-> Paper:
🧵 1/n
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Finally wrote my piece on the
@DeepIndaba
🎉💪🌍❤️✨
It was especially hard to describe the energizing and enriching atmosphere and feelings this year 😍
It's super long & still doesn't capture half of everything
#SautiYetu
#Masakhane
#DLIndaba2019
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Today I return to my favourite city in Africa, my 2nd home, for the greatest gathering of ML experts on the continent:
@DeepIndaba
After months of planning, it's finally happening! Few things can describe this feeling 🌍💗 🇰🇪
#SautiYetu
#DLIndaba2019
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Thanks
@DeepLearningAI_
for featuring some of my thoughts ☺️🌻✨
A childhood desire for a robotic best friend turned into a career of training computers in human language for
@alienelf
. Read about her fascination with language, the importance of community, and how to incorporate wine into your learning practice:
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This December, I was diagnosed with Shingles & burn out. Part of my healing was to turn off all things that bring on stress.
Apologies to everyone I ignored despite urgency. It was Doctor's orders 👩🏽⚕️💊
After a break, I'm glad to say I'm much healthier and happier 🎉😁 (1/2)
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Hey ML researchers. How do you stay focused?
I spend more time getting distracted by new research & how to incorporate it into my work, than actually making progress. As if I'm continuously searching for a better idea than the one I'm busy working on.
#DeepLearning
#Research
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I do not intend to do a PhD, but if I were to do it, I would love
@red_abebe
to be my supervisor 😻✨❤️
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Fam, I'm tired. Can we have the rest of the year off to, I dunno, just hang out?
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One of all time heroes just got fired by one of my all time heroes.
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I can't believe the publication on the *largest* stochastic parrot 🐦won Best Paper at
@NeurIPSConf
😨
The sheer fucking absurdity of it all. 🙃
#NeurIPS2020
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Are there any powerful allies to African ML researchers who would publicly boycott
@NeurIPSConf
until either
(a) Canada grants Visas to African researchers (unlikely) or
(b) The conference does not return to Canada?
I'm so done with this shit
#visasforresearchers
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Keynote from the darling
@seb_ruder
showing us how far African languages and NLP has come 😍👏
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Still super impressed how
@FAccTConference
had **heavily** discounted rates for individuals from developing countries. 🌍
This is key for D&I and I think all conferences should do this
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"I don't understand why you're angry so I'll assume it's because you're irrational"
instead of
"I don't understand why you're angry but I'm sure it is warranted so let me go educate myself why and listen more carefully"
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So excited to have spoken at
@WiMLworkshop
at
@NeurIPSConf
#NeurIPS2021
about
@MasakhaneNLP
with
@a_ogayo
and
@orevaahia
! (And chaired by the one and only
@NanaYaaSally
!)
Together, we build💕🌍💪
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I miss pure Computer Science. Combinatorics, Graph theory, Information science, etc.✨ My world is all software engineering & Deep Learning, which can be quite bland 🤷🏽♀️
Anyone have suggestions on classical Computer Scientists to follow in this sphere? 😊
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Honestly don't know how I ended up on this line up with a bunch of my heroes 😍 Omg! So nervous and excited
If you're at the
@DeepIndaba
in Nairobi this year, join us for the NLP Session on August 29. We'll have an amazing set of speakers including
@RichardSocher
,
@siminyu_kat
,
@alienelf
and
@sgouws
.
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Just a shoutout to
@gneubig
for being such an amazing ally to marginalized NLP communities. He listens carefully, and uses what he learns to bring about ACTUAL structural change at the organisations he is part of - and in doing so empowers those that societal structures ignore💕
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For this international women's day, I am treating myself by refusing to be on any panels and giving any talks about diversity or tech or otherwise 🤩💪
Instead I'm going to read a paper I really want to read ☺️🌈🌍
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The end of this month is my last day at wonderful
@teamretrorabbit
🐰It's been a long & exciting 9 yr journey. I've learnt so much about organizational culture, building teams, aiding people's growth & designing software
As for my next move, let's say:
🌸🌟WATCH THIS SPACE🌟🌸
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@marcusborba
This is unethical. How is this still being shared?
It's irresponsible to share this without discussion about ethics of ML.
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@ykilcher
@timnitGebru
To be honest Yannic, Timnit is busy. She does not need to spend more precious time on this. I refer to this quote by Toni Morrison
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Amazing advice for getting a job in ML from
@DaniiK
🤩
"Call them up and meet with them. Tell them you have 50% of the skills, 25% of the skills are irrelevant, and 25% I can learn within one year on the job" 🎉💗🌍🤩
#DLIndaba2019
#SautiYetu
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Majority of Women in Tech I know founded/participate in initiatives for Women in Tech
Imagine the world where even HALF the MEN in Tech participated in an initiative to support Women in Tech.
I'd imagine society would very quickly not need those initiatives anymore. 🤷🏽♀️
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The 2nd AfricaNLP workshop at ACL conf has a glorious proposed program featuring:
-
@sabelonow
on Decolonisation of NLP
-
@kolatubosun
on African expression
-
@sarahookr
in ML for low-resourced env
-
@davlanade
in NLP for African langs
Excited? Vote!
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"Each culture is best expressed in the language in which it has evolved. And every language evolves in it's cultural reality" ~ Túndé Adégbọlá
The gifts of wisdom at the
@MasakhaneNLP
speaker series 🌍💕💪🏿
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Self-care for me is waking up early 🌄, making coffee ☕writing and rewriting ideas I've been slowly pondering for years 🧠, and reading important papers I never have time to read during my days 👓
This is my public commitment to make this a regular event for myself🌻❤️
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