The ATHENA Research Centre hosts the Voices 2023 “Breaking the Bias” Summer School, 5-7 July, in Athens
The “Breaking the Bias” Summer School will be hosted by the ATHENA Research Centre, a Greek public research and innovation centre which conducts research in Information, Communication, and Knowledge Science and Technology. The local organizing team, coordinated by Katerina Pastra and Vivian Stamou, will welcome you at the Ionic Conference Centre, in Athens, an amazing venue located at Plaka, the historical city centre.
The ATHENA Centre has a dedicated committee on issues related to Gender Equality, is a founding member of the national network of Gender Equality Committees in Research Centres, and has a newly established “Innovation Unit for Women” which is the legal and operational hub of the Greek Innovation Lab for Women.
ATHENA has been very active in gender-equality related activities and it is within its vision and mission to contribute to research with a gender dimension. Katerina Pastra, senior researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ATHENA) and Vice-President of the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society has presented a case study on “Equity in Language Models” at the virtual WG3-Voices meeting on January 9th. In her presentation, she gave an overview of bias in Artificial Intelligence Technologies, focusing on Language Technology in particular and the inherent weaknesses of technologies such as GPT_Chat; it was shown that beyond propagation of bias and stereotypes found in their training data, these technologies actually generate/synthesise new information with no means to control for potentially fake, inaccurate or biased output. Endowing such systems with cognition has been proposed as a way to remedy this situation.