The WASP research arena for Media and Language (WARA M&L) promotes world-class AI research for Media and Language, by fostering a research community that cuts across scientific disciplines and industry segments, and providing a physical-virtual research environment for Media and Language AI.
About the Arena
The horizontal arena provides an excellent opportunity for transferring technologies to other fields and places Media and Language AI at the centre of a multidisciplinary ecosystem of scientific fields and industrial segments. The arena supports data management and benchmarking services together with engineering support and legal consultation. The activities in the arena focuses on data provisioning, developing infrastructure, and building community. By participating in the arena, the WASP researchers gain access to coordinating research challenges, datasets and a platform to test and verify the results.
Research Focus Areas
WARA Media and Language is defined by various research topics and areas that it addresses and the resources it provides. From the initial dialogues with stakeholders and the preliminary study through workshops, the research areas are classified into three categories.
Establishing the structured versions of concepts that can be used to detect, process and create instances of the concepts in a media setting.
- Language grounding
- Semantic parsing
- Media synthesis
- Vector-based language models
- Transfer Learning and domain adaptation
- Multimodal learning.
Extending the models by including the human senses and reach of control.
- Hierarchical classification
- Adaptive sensing
- Embodiment
- Adjustable autonomy.
- Dialogue management in chatbots
- Natural-language interfaces for personal assistants, autonomous vehicles, etc
- Speech synthesis for the Swedish language
Understanding and ensuring whether the systems developed are safe, purposeful and transparent.
- Trustworthy AI
- Virtual verification environment
- Bias management and fairness
- Data privacy and user agency
- Implications for politics, democracy, society, etc
Resources and Services
The arena provides both technical, structural and legal resources.
Data Generation and Capturing
- Data capturing controlled environments
- Secure data sharing
- Synthetic data creation
Annotation and Benchmarking Services
- Crowd-sourced annotations with limited access
- Multimodal focus: video, images, speech etc.
- Curated datasets for benchmarking
- Model evaluation through benchmarking services
Ecosystem Platform
- Software engineering team
- Legal support consultation
- Foster collaboration and community building
Research seminars
The arena welcomes proposals for new research seminars and industry meet-ups. Instructions for applicants are given in the Call for Proposals for Research Seminars.
WASP Summer School
The arena hosts the annual WASP Summer School at the Visualization Center C in Norrköping. During summer school, students attend various seminars from elite speakers and participate in a project to visualize 3D avatars with gestures in the dome. More information on the project is available in the WASP Summer School Project.
Webinars
The webinar series serves to raise awareness of current developments in national Media and Language AI, and to help arena partners find new collaboration. The series is hosted by Sandor Albrecht and streamed lived via Zoom. We also strive to make recordings available after the seminars.
Organization
The day-to-day affairs of the arena are manage by the operational team, while strategic decisions are made by the Steering Committee. The arena has at present two focus areas, namely natural language processing and AI for gaming, each with it's own managing team.
- Johanna Björklund, Project Manager, Umeå University & Codemill AB
- Sandor Albrecht, Co-project Manager, KAW
- Ivana von Proschwitz, Community Manager, WARA Media & Language
- Anastasia Varava, Data Scientist, SEB
- Konrad Tollmar, Research Director, EA Games / Associate Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Gustav Eje Henter, Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Jonas Unger, Professor, Linköping University
- Alexandra Kafka Larsson, CEO, Parsd
NLP
- Anastasia Varava, Data Scientist, SEB
Gaming
- Konrad Tollmar, Research Director, EA Games / Associate Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Gustav Eje Henter, Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology