Language Acts

Kalika Bali

Kalika Bali is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India working broadly in the area of Speech and Language Technology especially in the use of linguistic models for building technology that offers a more natural Human-Computer as well as Computer-Mediated interactions, and technology for Low Resource Languages. She is a linguist by training and technologist by profession, and believes that local language technology especially with speech interfaces, can help millions of people gain entry into a world that is till now almost inaccessible to them.

Quinn Dombrowski

Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. Previously, she worked in Research IT at UC Berkeley, and in Academic Technologies at the University of Chicago. Her background is in Slavic linguistics and library and information science.

Andiswa Bukula

Andiswa Bukula has been a language researcher for the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) since 2018 until present, hosted by the North West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. As a budding researcher for SADiLaR Andiswa is determined to expand her knowledge around Digital Humanities so that she could contribute that knowledge in the development and empowerment of South African indigenous languages, more so isiXhosa, which is her language of speciality. Andiswa’s research interest liesin Multilingualism, looking at how multilingualism can be implemented in South Africa, a culturally diverse country, as an instrument to embrace the diversity, particularly in the education sector.

Andiswa holds a bachelor’s degree in media communications and culture, an Honours in isiXhosa Literature, a Masters in isiXhosa Literature. As a PhD candidate, Andiswa is focusing her thesis on the impacts that multilingualism could have in the Higher Education sector in South Africa.

Monojit Choudhury

Dr. Monojit Choudhury is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research Lab India since 2007. His research spans many areas of Artificial Intelligence, cognitive science and linguistics. In particular, Dr. Choudhury has been working on technologies for low resource languages, code-switching (mixing of multiple languages in a single conversation), computational sociolinguistics and conversational AI. He has more than 100 publications in international conferences and refereed journals. Dr. Choudhury is an adjunct faculty at International Institute of Technology Hyderabad and Ashoka University. He also organizes the Panini Linguistics Olympiad for high school children in India and is the founding chair of the Asia-Pacific Linguistics Olympiad. Dr. Choudhury holds a B.Tech and PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.

Hoyt Long

Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on cultural analytics, media history, the sociology of literature, and the geography of cultural production. He co-directs Chicago’s Textual Optics Lab and has a forthcoming book on The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia University Press, 2021), which explores how computational methods can inform histories of modern Japanese literature.

Raoul Nanavati

Raoul Nanavati, CEO at Navana Tech, works with a team focused on creating domain-specific speech recognition and voice-bot solutions for the finance, agricultural and healthcare domains in India.

David Wrisley

David Wrisley is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research interests include spatial humanities as well as visualization and AI for the humanities.