Best Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Podcasts (2025)

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91: Stopping the Flow of US Arms to Mexico (Guests: Isabella D’Alacio, John Lindsay-Poland & Gerardo Álvarez) 35:37

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6d ago35:37

35:37

In this episode of “México Centered,” experts Isabella D’Alacio, John Lindsay-Poland, and Gerardo Álvarez join Tony to shed light on the dangerous flow of firearms from the U.S. into Mexico. They explore how criminal networks traffic powerful weapons across the border, the cultural and political obstacles to reform, and the ongoing efforts to curb …

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90: Claudia Sheinbaum’s Balancing Act 41:16

18d ago41:16

41:16

Tony Payan joined David Satterfield, director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and host of the “Baker Briefing” podcast, to discuss the challenges Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is facing — both domestically and in its relationship with the United States. This conversation was recorded on May 14, 2025. You can subscrib…

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89: Binational Dialogues: José Antonio Meade 36:10

2M ago36:10

36:10

On April 24, 2025, we hosted the inaugural webinar of our “Binational Dialogues” series, titled “Mexico’s Economy Today” and featuring José Antonio Meade Kuribreña. Meade offered an in-depth analysis of the current state of Mexico’s economy, followed by a thoughtful conversation with Tony Payan, director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico. Meade…

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88: Boosting Tech Entrepreneurship in Chihuahua (Guests: Kevin Koym and Ana Victoria Gutiérrez) 28:06

2M ago28:06

28:06

Tony Payan, director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico, is joined by Kevin Koym, founder and CEO of Tech Ranch, and Ana Victoria Gutiérrez, ecosystem intelligence leader at Startup Chihuahua. Together, they explore how strategic investment and community collaboration are driving the growth of tech entrepreneurship in Chihuahua. Featured guests:…

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87: Trump’s Sprawling Deportation Campaign (Guests: David Donatti, Luz Garcini & Tony Payan) 42:07

2M ago42:07

42:07

Last month, Tony Payan joined the “Baker Briefing” podcast along with Rice University professor Luz Maria Garcini and ACLU of Texas attorney David Donatti to discuss the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. They explored the legal and social implications of the administration’s unconventional targeting of legal permanent and temporary …

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86: Trump’s Mass Deportation Policy and the US Labor Market (Guest: Chloe East) 30:16

3M ago30:16

30:16

President Donald Trump has promised to carry out a mass deportation effort that would remove millions of immigrants residing illegally in the United States. Will the massive scale of deportations improve the U.S. economy and deliver greater job prospects for U.S.-born workers, as Trump has claimed? In early March, “México Centered” host Tony Payan …

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85: Mexico’s Artificial Intelligence Future Pt. 2 (Guests: Laura Ripani & Alejandro Dabdoub) 18:32

4M ago18:32

18:32

On “México Centered,” host Tony Payan continued his conversation on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in Mexico with Laura Ripani, Mexico’s country representative at the Inter-American Development Bank, and friend of the podcast Alejandro Dabdoub. They explored major questions about the future of work as AI advances: What implications does…

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84: How Will Trump’s Tariffs Impact American Industry and Consumers? (Guests: John Diamond, Steven Lewis & Ken Medlock) 41:15

4M ago41:15

41:15

In February, “México Centered” host Tony Payan joined three other Baker Institute experts to explore President Donald Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese goods and what they mean for U.S. industries and consumers — as well as our relationships with our largest trading partners. The conversation was moderated by John Di…

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83: Mexico’s Artificial Intelligence Future Pt. 1 (Guests: Claudia del Pozo & Alejandro Dabdoub) 22:02

5M ago22:02

22:02

Mexico was once one of the biggest leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) globally, but progress has since stalled. Now, there’s renewed hope: President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in October 2024, has created an Agency for Digital Transformation and Telecommunications (ATDT), and the topic is also receiving attention from the Mexican Congr…

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82: Mexico's Budget Proposal for 2025 (Guest: Mariana Campos) 36:19

6M ago36:19

36:19

On Nov. 15, 2024, the Mexican government released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025, which runs from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31. The government pledged to narrow its fiscal deficit from around 6% in 2024 to around 3% in 2025, and according to the budget proposal, there will be no additional taxes, and the economy will grow between 2% and 3% next…

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Episode 81 - Deportations, Tariffs, Fentanyl: What's next for the US MX Relation (Guest: The Honorable Christopher Landau) 24:14

7M ago24:14

24:14

On the campaign trail, Mexico was very much in Donald Trump’s cross-hairs. Now that he’s set to return to office, his pledges — including mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, a 25% tariff on Mexican goods and services, and a “war on drug cartels” — could indeed become reality. What could these policies look like in practice, and how will th…

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Episode 80 - AI and the Binantional Relation (Guests: Chris Bronk and Alejandro Dabdoub) 24:36

8M ago24:36

24:36

The Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute stays abreast of the many issues affecting the binational relationship–including some issues that are not as intuitive and are often not in the media. One of these is artificial intelligence. To explore what AI can do to the U.S.-Mexico relationship - in academia, secu…

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Episode 79 - Mexico's Judicial Reform (Guests: Javier Martin Reyes and David Gantz) 37:07

9M ago37:07

37:07

Mexico’s sweeping overhaul of the country’s court system took effect last month, in the final weeks before President López Obrador handed the keys of the National Palace to his mentee and successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum. Mexico is now one of the few countries in the world that elects its judges, including at the Supreme Court level, by popul…

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Episode 78: The USMCA Review and Other Trade Challenges (Guest: C.J. Mahoney) 23:16

10M ago23:16

23:16

International trade has flourished in recent decades. In the U.S., which is both the world’s largest importer and exporter of goods and services, trade has lowered the costs of everyday goods, raised the living standard, and fueled job growth. But it has also eliminated some jobs, mostly in manufacturing. As a result, support for free trade has dec…

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Episode 77: Claudia Sheinbaum and AMLO’s Looming Shadow (Guest: Tony Payan) 30:42

10M ago30:42

30:42

Late last month, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a “pause” in relations with the U.S. embassy. These latest tensions between the two countries came after U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar criticized López Obrador’s proposed judicial reforms, which include electing judges by popular vote. Salazar called this measure “a ma…

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Episode 76: Voter Attitudes in Mexico and the US (Guest: Carlos Moreno Jaimes) 19:56

1y ago19:56

19:56

In this month's episode of Mexico Centered, Tony Payan sits down with Carlos Moreno Jaimes, professor and researcher at ITESO Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara, about voter attitudes in the Mexican and U.S. electorates and a recent survey he conducted to look at this issue. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States a…

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Episode 75: Mexico's Elections: The Results (Guest: Lorena Becerra) 20:16

1y ago20:16

20:16

Tony Payan sits down with Lorena Becerra, political analyst and CEO of Lorena Becerra Encuestas, to analyze the results of Mexico’s presidential election on June 2, 2024. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico visit our website, and follow us on X/Twitter and LinkedIn. To join our mailing list, please su…

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Episode 74: Mexico's Post-Presidential Election Scenarios (Guest: Javier Martin Reyes) 25:22

1y ago25:22

25:22

In this episode we sit down with Javier Martin Reyes, researcher at the Institute for Legal Research at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) for a conversation on Mexico's post-presidential election scenarios and their possible legal consequences. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico visit ou…

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Episode 73: Mexico's Presidential Elections, the Candidates, Continuity and the Binational Relation (Guest: Carlos Bravo Regidor) 22:18

1y ago22:18

22:18

As Mexico's current presidential administration approaches its final days, key questions about the country’s future arise. Some of the critical challenges facing Mexico range from political to democratic principles, such as the growing poverty rate, the state of public safety, and the U.S.–Mexico binational relationship. How will the next president…

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Episode 72: The 2024 Presidential Elections in Mexico (Guests: Tony Payan, Ivan Rodriguez Sanchez; Edward M. Emmett) 23:24

1+ y ago23:24

23:24

We're back! After a hiatus of almost 2 years the Mexico Centered podcast returns...and just in time for Mexico's 2024 presidential elections. In this episode, a crossover with the Baker Institute's Baker Briefing podcast, host and Baker Institute fellow Edward M. Emmett sits down with Tony Payan, director, and Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez, scholar, …

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Are LLMs safe? 42:15

1+ y ago42:15

42:15

Curious about the safety of LLMs? 🤔 Join us for an insightful new episode featuring Suchin Gururangan, Young Investigator at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Engineer at Appuri. 🚀 Don't miss out on expert insights into the world of LLMs!By Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

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"Imaginative AI" with Mohamed Elhoseiny 23:19

1+ y ago23:19

23:19

This podcast episode features Dr. Mohamed Elhoseiny, a true luminary in the realm of computer vision with over a decade of groundbreaking research. As an Assistant Professor at KAUST, Dr. Elhoseiny's work delves into the intersections of Computer Vision, Language & Vision, and Computational Creativity in Art, Fashion, and AI. Notably, he co-organiz…

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142 - Science Of Science, with Kyle Lo 48:57

1+ y ago48:57

48:57

Our first guest with this new format is Kyle Lo, the most senior lead scientist in the Semantic Scholar team at Allen Institute for AI (AI2), who kindly agreed to share his perspective on #Science of #Science (#scisci) on our podcast. SciSci is concerned with studying how people do science, and includes developing methods and tools to help people c…

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141 - Building an open source LM, with Iz Beltagy and Dirk Groeneveld 29:36

2y ago29:36

29:36

In this special episode of NLP Highlights, we discussed building and open sourcing language models. What is the usual recipe for building large language models? What does it mean to open source them? What new research questions can we answer by open sourcing them? We particularly focused on the ongoing Open Language Model (OLMo) project at AI2, and…

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140 - Generative AI and Copyright, with Chris Callison-Burch 51:28

2y ago51:28

51:28

In this special episode, we chatted with Chris Callison-Burch about his testimony in the recent U.S. Congress Hearing on the Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law. We started by asking Chris about the purpose and the structure of this hearing. Then we talked about the ongoing discussion on how the copyright law is applicable to content generated…

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139 - Coherent Long Story Generation, with Kevin Yang 45:18

2+ y ago45:18

45:18

How can we generate coherent long stories from language models? Ensuring that the generated story has long range consistency and that it conforms to a high level plan is typically challenging. In this episode, Kevin Yang describes their system that prompts language models to first generate an outline, and iteratively generate the story while follow…

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138 - Compositional Generalization in Neural Networks, with Najoung Kim 48:22

2+ y ago48:22

48:22

Compositional generalization refers to the capability of models to generalize to out-of-distribution instances by composing information obtained from the training data. In this episode we chatted with Najoung Kim, on how to explicitly evaluate specific kinds of compositional generalization in neural network models of language. Najoung described COG…

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137 - Nearest Neighbor Language Modeling and Machine Translation, with Urvashi Khandelwal 35:56

2+ y ago35:56

35:56

We invited Urvashi Khandelwal, a research scientist at Google Brain to talk about nearest neighbor language and machine translation models. These models interpolate parametric (conditional) language models with non-parametric distributions over the closest values in some data stores built from relevant data. Not only are these models shown to outpe…

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Episode 71: Hosting Mexico Centered (Guests: Tony Payan and Enrique Quezada) 33:25

3y ago33:25

33:25

In his final episode as host, Enrique Quezada sits down with Tony Payan, director of the Baker Institute Center for the U.S. and Mexico, to look back at how the podcast started and the role it has played at the Center. Enrique talks about preparing for interviews and the behind-the-scenes work to produce Mexico Centered. For more information on the…

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Episode 70: Trans-border Collaboration Across the Rio Grande (Guests: Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Big Bend National Park, and Javier Ochoa, subdirector of the protected areas Maderas del Carmen and ... 41:44

3y ago41:44

41:44

Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Big Bend National Park, and Javier Ochoa, subdirector of the protected areas Maderas del Carmen and Ocampo, talk about the different models of conservation the U.S. and Mexico have, their day-to-day activities, and the numerous ways in which they collaborate across the border to the benefit of the ecosystem they sh…

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Episode 69: The Significance of Mexico's 2022 Local Elections (Guest: Alejandro Cruz, director of special studies at BGC Ulises Beltrán y Asociados) 33:35

3y ago33:35

33:35

Alejandro Cruz, director of special studies at BGC Ulises Beltrán y Asociados and an expert in local elections in Mexico, discusses the results of the June 2022 local elections in Mexico and their significance for the López Obrador administration and the president’s party. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and…

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136 - Including Signed Languages in NLP, with Kayo Yin and Malihe Alikhani 1:02:15

3y ago1:02:15

1:02:15

In this episode, we talk with Kayo Yin, an incoming PhD at Berkeley, and Malihe Alikhani, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, about opportunities for the NLP community to contribute to Sign Language Processing (SLP). We talked about history and misconceptions about sign languages, high-level similarities and differences between …

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Episode 68: The Dream of a Binational Park (Guest: Francisco Cantú, writer, translator, and author) 32:48

3y ago32:48

32:48

Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River, discusses his recent article for Audubon Magazine where he wrote about a grand dream for an international park encompassing Big Bend on the U.S side and Santa Elena and Maderas del Carmen on the Mexican side. Cantú talks about what he learned during his visit about the different approaches of the…

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Episode 67: Mexico's National Guard and Public Safety (Guest: Richard Kilroy) 21:52

3+ y ago21:52

21:52

Richard J. Kilroy, nonresident scholar at the Center for the United States and Mexico and associate professor of politics at Coastal Carolina University, discusses the role of Mexico’s National Guard in President López Obrador’s public safety strategy. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico visit our web…

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Episode 66: The Dangers of Being a Journalist in Mexico (Guest: Peniley Ramírez) 29:38

3+ y ago29:38

29:38

Peniley Ramírez, investigative journalist and columnist for the newspaper Reforma, talks about the dangers of being a journalist in Mexico, the mechanisms in place to protect journalists, and the relationship between Lopez Obrador and the media. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico visit our website, a…

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135 - PhD Application Series: After Submitting Applications 36:53

3+ y ago36:53

36:53

This episode is the third in our current series on PhD applications.We talk about what the PhD application process looks like after applications are submitted. We start with a general overview of the timeline, then talk about how to approach interviews and conversations with faculty, and finish by discussing the different factors to consider in dec…

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Episode 65: 2021 Annual Roundup (Guest: Tony Payan) 32:27

3+ y ago32:27

32:27

Tony Payan, director of the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico, discusses what happened in 2021 to Mexico’s economy, politics, public health, and to the binational relationship with the United States. He also sets out expectations for 2022. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico visi…

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Episode 64: Binational Healthcare: A conversation with Houston Methodist Hospital (Jose Nuñez, VP, Global Development at Houston Methodist’s Global Health Care Services) 20:00

3+ y ago20:00

20:00

José Núñez, the vice president for Global Development at Houston Methodist’s Global Health Care Services, talks about how Mexican patients access healthcare services in the United States, what Houston Methodist’s partnerships with the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey and Mexico City’s ABC Medical Center entail, and how the coronavirus pandemic af…

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134 - PhD Application Series: PhDs in Europe versus the US, with Barbara Plank and Gonçalo Correia 38:29

3+ y ago38:29

38:29

This episode is the second in our current series on PhD applications.How do PhD programs in Europe differ from PhD programs in the US, and how should people decide between them? In this episode, we invite Barbara Plank (Professor at ITU, IT University of Copenhagen) and Gonçalo Correia (ELLIS PhD student at University of Lisbon and University of Am…

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Episode 63: A Conversation with Consul General Alicia Kerber Palma 30:11

3+ y ago30:11

30:11

Alicia Kerber Palma, consul general of Mexico in Houston since 2019, talks about her time in the Mexican Foreign Service, the programs and services provided by Mexico’s Consulate General in Houston, feminist foreign policy, and the binational relationship. For more information on the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico visit our…

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133 - PhD Application Series: Preparing Application Materials, with Nathan Schneider and Roma Patel 43:54

4y ago43:54

43:54

This episode is the first in our current series on PhD applications.How should people prepare their applications to PhD programs in NLP? In this episode, we invite Nathan Schneider (Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Georgetown University) and Roma Patel (PhD student in Computer Science at Brown University) to share their perspectives…

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132 - Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge and Alquist 4.0, with Petr Marek 41:43

4y ago41:43

41:43

In this episode, we discussed the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge and this year's winning submission, Alquist 4.0, with Petr Marek, a member of the winning team. Petr gave us an overview of their submission, the design choices that led to them winning the competition, including combining a hardcoded dialog tree and a neural generator model an…

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Episode 62: El Problema del Crimen Organizado en México (Guest: Eduardo Guerrero) 27:15

4y ago27:15

27:15

This podcast is in Spanish. Eduardo Guerrero, socio fundador y director de Lantia Consultores y Lantia Intelligence, habla sobre la complicada situación de seguridad nacional y el incremento en la violencia relacionada al crimen organizado en México. Para mayor información sobre el Centro para Estados Unidos y México del Instituto Baker, visite nue…

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131 - Opportunities and Barriers between HCI and NLP, with Nanna Inie and Leon Derczynski 46:54

4y ago46:54

46:54

What can NLP researchers learn from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research? We chatted with Nanna Inie and Leon Derczynski to find out. We discussed HCI's research processes including methods of inquiry, the data annotation processes used in HCI, and how they are different from NLP, and the cognitive methods used in HCI for qualitative error ana…

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130 - Linking human cognitive patterns to NLP Models, with Lisa Beinborn 44:02

4y ago44:02

44:02

In this episode, we talk with Lisa Beinborn, an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, about how to use human cognitive signals to improve and analyze NLP models. We start by discussing different kinds of cognitive signals—eye-tracking, EEG, MEG, and fMRI—and challenges associated with using them. We then turn to Lisa’s recent work co…

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129 - Transformers and Hierarchical Structure, with Shunyu Yao 35:43

4y ago35:43

35:43

In this episode, we talk to Shunyu Yao about recent insights into how transformers can represent hierarchical structure in language. Bounded-depth hierarchical structure is thought to be a key feature of natural languages, motivating Shunyu and his coauthors to show that transformers can efficiently represent bounded-depth Dyck languages, which can…

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128 - Dynamic Benchmarking, with Douwe Kiela 47:00

4y ago47:00

47:00

We discussed adversarial dataset construction and dynamic benchmarking in this episode with Douwe Kiela, a research scientist at Facebook AI Research who has been working on a dynamic benchmarking platform called Dynabench. Dynamic benchmarking tries to address the issue of many recent datasets getting solved with little progress being made towards…

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Episode 61: The Aftermath of Mexico's 2021 Midterm Elections (Guest: Tony Payan) 25:09

4y ago25:09

25:09

Tony Payan, the Françoise and Edward Djerejian Fellow for Mexico Studies and director of the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University, discusses the implications of the 2021 midterm elections for Mexico’s president, the president's party, the opposition, and electoral institutions. For more information on the Baker…

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127 - Masakhane and Participatory Research for African Languages, with Tosin Adewumi and Perez Ogayo 47:17

4y ago47:17

47:17

We invited members of Masakhane, Tosin Adewumi and Perez Ogayo, to talk about their EMNLP Findings paper that discusses why typical research is limited for low-resourced NLP and how participatory research can help. As a result of participatory research, Masakhane has many, many success stories: first datasets and benchmarks in African languages, fi…

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126 - Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation, with Lisa Li 47:38

4y ago47:38

47:38

We invited Lisa Li to talk about her recent work, Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation. Prefix tuning is a lightweight alternative to finetuning, and the idea is to tune only a fixed-length task-specific continuous vector, and to keep the pretrained transformer parameters frozen. We discussed how prefix tuning compares with f…

Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence Podcasts