Bourhan Yassin
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The future of bioacoustics and AI for large-scale biodiversity monitoring
Abstract
TBD
Biography
Bourhan Yassin has deep roots in both the tech and conservation sectors. With over two decades of experience, he has led large-scale Operations and Engineering teams in several prominent Bay Area companies and steered significant projects as COO of a major e-commerce platform in Dubai before dedicating his life to conservation. Over the past seven years, Bourhan has transformed the non-profit Rainforest Connection into a leading force in global conservation. He assembled a talented and diverse team from around the world, successfully bringing the organization's mission to life in 35 countries. Under his leadership and strategic direction, the organization made groundbreaking strides in biodiversity monitoring and environmental protection. Recognized as one of the 2023 Google.org Leaders to Watch, he’s a driving force in the conservation field. Now, he is embarking on an exciting new journey to revolutionize the integration of technology, AI, science, and biodiversity monitoring.
Nancy F. Chen
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Abstract
TBD
Biography
Nancy F. Chen is an ASTAR fellow, who leads the Multimodal Generative AI group and heads the Artificial Intelligence for Education (AI4EDU) programme at I2R (Institute for Infocomm Research) and is a principal investigator at CFAR (Centre for Frontier AI Research). Dr. Chen’s recent work in large language models have won honors at ACL 2024, including Area Chair Award and Best Paper Award for Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP. Dr. Chen consistently garners best paper awards for her AI research applied to diverse applications, exemplified by accolades at IEEE ICASSP 2011 (forensics), APSIPA 2016 (education), SIGDIAL 2021 (social media), MICCAI 2021 (neuroscience), and EMNLP 2023 (healthcare). Multilingual technology from her team has led to commercial spin-offs and is deployed at Singapore’s Ministry of Education to support home-based learning. Dr. Chen has supervised 100+ students and staff. She has won professional awards from USA National Institute of Health, IEEE, Microsoft, P&G, UNESCO, and L’Oréal. She servers as APSIPA Board of Governors (2024-2026), IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2024), Program Chair of ICLR 2023, Board Member of ISCA (2021-2025), Board Member of APSIPA (2024-2025) and is honoured as Singapore 100 Women in Tech (2021). Prior to ASTAR, she worked at MIT Lincoln Lab while pursuing a PhD at MIT and Harvard.
For more info: http://alum.mit.edu/www/nancychen