Join the upcoming Eindhoven Circle on September 19 about Inclusive AI at the AI Innovation Center!

Chatbots, Large Language Models and speech recognition systems have achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of applications. However, Jasmijn Bastings (Google DeepMind) and Odette Scharenborg (TU Delft) will showcase with real-world examples that these advancements fall short in serving everyone, and they outline the long road we have ahead to achieve inclusive AI.

Join Women in AI as we explore the challenges and future of developing inclusive AI that benefits all! Secure your spot and be part of the change!

Program:
17:00 Doors open
17:25 Introduction WAI Eindhoven
17:30 Jasmijn Bastings (Google Deepmind): Towards Gender-Fair Language Technology
18:00 Odette Scharenborg (TU Delft): Inclusive speech technology: Developing automatic speech recognition for everyone
18:30 – 19:30 Networking & Drinks

Towards Gender-Fair Language Technology by Jasmijn Bastings

Not a day goes by without AI being in the news. This is true, especially of chatbots powered by general-purpose foundation models, also called large language models (LLMs). People are generating essays, recipes, and complete fantasy worlds that they interact with. At the same time, automatic translation between human languages remains one of the most popular use cases in language technology. While some consider translation “solved”, we have seen — and are still seeing — many examples of translation services failing, quite often so because of gender bias. In this talk, I’ll discuss examples covering the past decade of research on gender bias to show how far we’ve come, but also to sketch the long road we have ahead, and how LLMs might help.

Inclusive speech technology by Odette Scharenborg

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is increasingly used, e.g., in emergency response centers, domestic voice assistants, and search engines. Because of the paramount relevance spoken language plays in our lives, it is critical that ASR systems are able to deal with the variability in the way people speak (e.g., due to speaker differences, demographics, different speaking styles, and differently-abled users). ASR systems promise to deliver objective interpretation of human speech. Practice and recent evidence however suggest that the state-of-the-art ASRs struggle with the large variation in speech due to e.g., gender, age, speech impairment, race, and accents. In this talk, I will discuss why state-of-the-art automatic speech recognizers fail for certain speakers, and what we do in our research to mitigate this bias against these speakers.

About the speakers 



About Jasmijn Bastings
Dr Jasmijn Bastings is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. She holds a PhD and MSc in artificial intelligence (AI) from the University of Amsterdam, and a BSc in AI with a minor in linguistics from Utrecht University. Jasmijn has worked on various topics within natural language processing, including automatic translation and interpretability, and has more recently been focusing on fair and inclusive AI.

About Odette Scharenborg
Dr Odette Scharenborg is an associate professor at the Department of Intelligent Systems, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on human speech-processing inspired automatic speech processing with the aim to develop inclusive speech technology, i.e., speech technology that works for everyone irrespective of how they speak or the language they speak. Odette has been a Board member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) since 2017. From 2021-2023 she served as Vice-President, and currently as President. She will be the General Chair of Interspeech Rotterdam, 2025.