The interdisciplinary Cambridge Festival will take place from 17 March - 2 April 2023 with a mixture of on online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at Cambridge.
The folllwing is a selection of language sciences-related events at this year's festival.
For a full list of events and to book please visit: Events | Cambridge Festival
DJUDEO-ESPANYOL OF THESSALONIKI: AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE AND HERITAGE
5:00pm-6:30pm on Friday 17 March
Online: book here
Djudeo-espanyol (Judeo-Spanish, Ladino, Djudesmo) is a Romance language, spoken by the descendants of those Jews who left the various kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the persecutions, expulsions and forced conversions that took place in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Ioanna Sitaridou is Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics. As a leading expert on 13th-century Spanish syntax, she will be exploring the affinities between Judeo-Spanish and Old Spanish, to reconstruct the multilingual sociolinguistic conditions that led to the emergence of the former.
AI TRUTH TELLERS: FACT OR FICTION?
11:00am-12:00pm on Saturday 18 March
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Room TBC, William Gates Building 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FD
In the Department of Computer Science and Technology, researchers are developing state-of-the-art software to automatically verify claims made in text – e.g. on Wikipedia pages or in politician’s speeches. They’re working to understand how artificial intelligence needs to reason in order to find the evidence to support, or debunk, the claims that are made to us.
In this workshop, you can meet the research team, hear about their work, watch a live demo of them checking facts and have a go yourself, using either your own smart device or one supplied by the Department. Following the workshop, you will have the opportunity to chat with the researchers and also try out their fact-checking software.
MEET NAO, THE ROBOT HELPING ASSESS MENTAL WELLBEING IN CHILDREN
10:00am-12:30pm on Saturday 18 March
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Room TBC, William Gates Building 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FD
In this event, parents and children can meet researchers who are interested in developing ‘social robots’ that can successfully interact with humans and carry out tasks such as helping us assess and manage our wellbeing. Specifically, the researchers – in collaboration with colleagues in the University’s Department of Psychiatry – are involved in a project to determine whether robots could effectively be used to support children’s wellbeing.
‘Nao’ is a small robot, and children taking part in the study answer the questions that Nao asks them by pressing buttons on its feet. At this workshop, children and their parents can have the chance to meet and interact with Nao in a 10-minute, one-to-one session. Researchers working on the project will explain to parents the potential for using Nao to aid the evaluation of children’s mental wellbeing, and talk about the results they have already obtained in their previous study.
TRY A ‘ROBODIARY’ SESSION WITH PEPPER THE ROBOT
10:00am-12:30pm on Saturday 18 March
Department of Computer Science and Technology, William Gates Building 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FD
Come along for a 15-minute, one-to-one taster session with Pepper, the robodiary, where you’ll sample what it will be like to work through a ‘Best Possible Self’ journalling exercise. The exercise will be explained to you by Pepper. Pepper will then do some simple observational tasks with you to increase your attentiveness, and also ask you to think about and share how you want your ideal future life to shape up, focusing on some self-reflection. Please book early as places will be limited.
MOTHER TONGUE OTHER TONGUE CELEBRATION EVENT 2023
4:00pm-7:00pm on Wednesday 22 March
Murray Edwards College, Buckingham House, Huntingdon Road, CB3 0DF
Mother Tongue Other Tongue is a national project, originally created together with the then Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. It involves a competition that is being run in the eastern region by Routes into Languages East. Mother Tongue encourages children, who do not have English as a first language, or who speak a different language at home, to share a lullaby, poem or song from their mother tongue and to explain what it means to them.
POLARISATION, HATE SPEECH AND THE ROLE OF AI
5:30pm-6:30pm on Thursday 23 March
Alison Richard Building, Room SG1 and Live Stream online, Sidgwick Site 7 West Road, CB3 9DP
In this talk, Dr Stefanie Ullmann aims to give an overview of the current risks as well as opportunities posed by artificially intelligent systems in the context of online (de)polarisation. While, on the one hand, we are confronted with feed algorithms, recommender systems, filter bubbles and echo chambers, we can, on the other hand, make use of techniques such as redirect search, digital nudging, quarantining and even automated counter-speech or storytelling to disrupt the development of radicalisation and polarisation online.
Dr Ullmann will explore in more detail how artificial intelligence contributes to the spreading of hate speech and radical ideas, and how it can be used to interrupt this process and prevent further polarisation. Dr Ullmann is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Giving Voice to Digital Democracies project at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: CAN SYSTEMS LIKE CHATGPT AUTOMATE EMPATHY?
5:30pm-6:30pm on Friday 31 March
Alison Richard Building, SG1 and Live Stream, Sidgwick Site 7 West Road, CB3 9DT
This talk will explore the difficulties of defining ’empathy’ before explaining in an accessible manner how state-of-the-art dialogue systems such as ChatGPT work, and summarising some of the techniques that are being used to make such systems seem more empathetic. Yet, there are potential dangers that must be addressed too. In human societies, psychopaths often have low levels of empathy, yet they frequently learn how to fake empathy quite effectively.
Therefore, this talk will consider some of the social and ethical implications of creating automated systems that can imitate human-like empathetic responses convincingly despite having no actual capacity for empathy. This talk will be given by Marcus Tomalin, from the Giving Voice to Digital Democracies project, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).
Image from Cambridge Festival listing for 'Meet Nao, the Robot Helping Assess Mental Wellbeing in Children' event