See below for our three keynote speakers spanning speech, data ethics, computational social science, and core NLP.
Head of Safety, Cohere
Dr Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant is the Head of AI Safety at Cohere, where she works on both the practice and the theory of evaluating and mitigating harms from LLMs. She did her PhD in Fairness for NLP at the University of Edinburgh, and her MSc in Language Generation at UW. Her research interests include the intersection of fairness with robustness and generalisation, cross-lingual transfer, and causal analysis. She has previously worked at Google in Tokyo, NYC, and Shanghai, and been a research engineer for ISI, DARPA, and the Gates Foundation. She also spent two years in the North Sea teaching disadvantaged teens to sail.
Chancellor’s Fellow, University of Edinburgh School of Business
Dr Kevin Guyan is the author of Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury, 2022) and a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He is currently writing his second book, which explores queer encounters with different classification systems in the UK, from hate crime reporting to dating apps.
Lecturer, University of Southampton
Dr Jennifer Williams is a Lecturer at the University of Southampton, where she is PI/Co-PI on several large interdisciplinary projects, including voice anonymisation, deepfake detection, public perceptions of speech technology, speech paralinguistics for medical applications, and AI regulation. She is also the South England Engagement Director and Co-I on the new EPSRC National Edge AI Hub, which is a consortium of 12 universities in the UK. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh on representation learning for speech signal disentanglement, while working part-time in industry on edge-device voice recognition. She is Chair of the ISCA special interest group on Security and Privacy in Speech Communication (SPSC-SIG) and a member of the NIST-OSAC subcommittee on speaker recognition for forensic science.