Reserve your ticket now to keep up with the future

MozFest is a unique hybrid conference: partly a meeting of art, technology, and society, partly a festival of developers and gathering of activists from various global movements fighting for a more humane digital world. Every year MozFest is attended by artists, IT engineers, designers and journalists from around the world.  

This year BCNL will participate in this prominent international forum with its own session dedicated to the fair and non-discriminatory use of artificial intelligence. 

The session “Trustworthy AI Needs Trustworthy Data – Tackling the Linguistic Discrimination in Training Data” will be accessible on 21 March – 14:45. 

While NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies and the availability of related tools for English have improved considerably in recent years, NLP tools for other languages are lagging far behind. Even for popular languages, such as German, it is revealed that the quantity and quality of available data and NLP tools is insufficient, resulting in reduced performance of the algorithms detecting offensive speech, while also exhibiting strong levels of bias. The problem becomes even more evident for not-so-popular languages (Bulgarian, Slovenian etc.). Being a native speaker of an under-resourced languages in fact is a basis for discrimination as those people won’t have equal access to or enjoy the same quality of services relying on NLP technology trained with English based training data. 

In this session, we will discuss and illustrate through experiments what are the main issues with using English-based or “universal language”-based training data for “teaching” NLP technologies working with other under-resourced languages. We will focus on the effect of this tendency on search engines, content moderation tools and detection and understanding of hate speech. The discussion session will include human rights activists and people from the technology sector and together we will discuss: 1) Best practices in ensuring the promotion of use of properly tested, documented and maintained language tools (NLP tools) for a wide range of languages; 2) Ideas on how to avoid the formation of biases observed in English and other big language-based NLP technologies when developing new training data for other languages; 3) What legislative and policy measures are appropriate for ensuring language diversity focusing on the European Commission’s proposal for an AI Act. 

We strive to have this conversation with a wide range of people who are interested in the topic to better understand the issues and to find the right solutions together. 

Reserve your MozFest ticket now. You can get your ticket completely free of charge. MozFest also provides the opportunity to contribute to the Fest by donating a sum of your choice. With the fee “Pay what you can” you will get access to MozFest Plaza, which will allow you to browse, attend and learn about the hundreds of sessions available, and much more. The advised sum for a donation is 45 EUR. 

The panel of the session will include: 

Mihail Ekimdzhiev is a managing partner at Ekimdzhiev & Partners Law Firm and a practicing lawyer with over 30 years of experience in the fields of public international law, criminal law and human rights protection. He provides procedural representation before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg and has won over 100 cases before of the ECtHR. He has a specialialization in Human Rights protection in the Council of Europe. 

Katina Boncheva is a partner in Ekimdzhiev & Partners Law Firm and a practicing lawyer with over 20 years of experience in civil, commercial and administrative cases. She is also a managing director of the “Association for European Integration of Human Rights” Foundation and has experience as a lawyer in cases before the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the Civil Service Tribunal and the General Court of the EU. She holds a specialization from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She is also a lecturer in a number of trainings held at the „Krastyu Tsochev“ Lawyer Training Center and a member of the advisory board of “European Legal View”. 

Petar Tornev is the director of the Technology center of Accenture Bulgaria. He has been working in the IT field for more than 15 years. He graduated “Computer systems and Technologies” at the Technical university – Varna. He became a graduate of Harvard Business School after completing the Leadership Development program in 2015. In 2020, he completed his EMBA at the American University in Bulgaria. He is interested in and works for transformation and improvement of leadership potential and education in Bulgaria. He contributes to the development of strategies and innovative solutions in cloud technologies, cyber security, online sales, management, as well as the implementation of policies related to cultural, age and gender diversity in companies.  

Domen Savic is the director of Citizen D, a Ljubljana-based NGO that explores the changing landscape of human rights in the information society, studies the “surveillance society” , maps propagandistic media practices and promotes active citizen participation. In his previous roles, he worked as a brand manager for mobile app developer Outfit7, as head of marketing for e-health startup Iryo and as a content developer for mobile app developer Tricky Tribe. Domen also worked as a journalist for the Slovenian daily newspaper Dnevnik. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Ljubljana. 

Martin Boyanov has worked on problems such as sentiment analysis and influencer identification at Komfo, document clustering and business event classification at Commetric and recommendations systems at Smule. He tries to find the most practical uses of modern algorithms for machine learning and data analysis. His expertise is participating in the entire process of developing ML solutions – from prototype to market release and further. 

The session will be moderated by Zahari Iankov – senior legal expert of the Bulgarian Center for Non-Profit Law. Zahari holds a Master’s degree in law from Sofia university and a Master’s degree in Human rights and Democracy from the University of Bologna.