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Selected publications, media, and talks


  • [UPCOMING] Harnessing AI for Positive Societal Impact. Talk at Impact Forum conference. Barcelona, November 2024

  • Humanitarian AI and Innovation. Episode on the Living with Purpose podcast. October 2024 (episode)

  • Humanitarian AI in Action. Keynote at Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) seminar on "AI applications for Mine Action", October 2024

  • Tools of the Trade - AI for Humanitarian Use Cases. Guest lecture in AI Learning Journey program, University College London, August 2024

  • Charting the Roadmap for AI Uptake in Humanitarian Action. Panel discussion at Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Weeks, Geneva, May 2024 (link)

  • Envisioning Inclusivity as the Cornerstone of the America's Economic Future. Panel discussion at Building Inclusive Economies event hosted by IRC/International Refugee Committee, New York, May 2024

  • 20 Years of AI "We Are All the Stakeholders". Interview with CCN, May 2024 (article)

  • A Practical Approach to Ethical AI. Invited talk at Ethical AI Symposium, Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. April 2024 (link)

  • Building the Extensions of Artificial Intelligence. Interview on Free Your Voice podcast. February 2024 (video)

  • Ethical use of AI: seeking, understanding, and countering the risks. Invited talk at NDC Conference, Sydney, Australia. February 2024 (link)

  • The Role of AI in Building a more Equitable Future. Invited talk at NDC Conference, Sydney, Australia. February 2024 (link)

  • The Role of the Tech Sector in Social Impact Partnerships. Guest lecture in Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington. November 2023

  • Combining Sector Expertise for Innovation: Digitizing data collection and analysis to advance health equity. Joint talk with Children International at NetHope Global Summit. October 2023 (link)

  • The Social Fabric and AI: Equity as a Foundational Tenet. Invited talk at World Changers Summit, The Vatican. July 2023 (segment video, session)

  • The AI Linguist. Monaco Voice 40 over 40. June 2023 (article)

  • Prioritizing AI equity in an environment that's really, really excited about AI capabilities. Guest talk in Department of Communication, University of Washington. April 2023 (link)

  • The Impact Report. Interview with Paragon One. April 2023 (link)

  • Digital Transformation in the Humanitarian Sector. Keynote at SocioDigital 2022 conference. SocioDigital Lab for Public Policy, ISCTE Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal. November, 2022 (video, session)

  • Tech for Social Impact. Fireside Chat on social entrepreneurship with YY Ventures at Impact Hub Dhaka, Bangladesh. November 2022 (link)

  • Data Sharing for Disaster Response. Blogpost, Microsoft. October 2022 (link)

  • Engage! How humanitarian organizations are spurring innovation in AI. Keynote at Summer School in Digital Technologies in Sintra, ISCTE Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal. July 2022 (link)

  • Scaling Impact: the case for humanitarian NLP. Keynote at NLP for Conversational AI workshop at ACL 2022, Dublin. May 2022 (link)

  • Tech for Good through the lens of the 5th Revolution for People, Planet, and Prosperity. World Humanitarian Forum Davos roundtable. January 2022 (video)

  • The Non-native Canonical Accent - and how to use it. Conference talk, the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Seattle, WA. December 2021 (link)

  • Artificial Intelligence Advancements for Humanitarian Assistance. Panel discussion at World Humanitarian Forum, New York. September 2021 (link)

  • AI in the Nonprofit Sector: Four Considerations for Building Effective Partnerships. Blogpost, NetHope. June 2021 (link)

  • The Cloud: where Data Enthusiasts Find their Superpowers to Change the World. Conference talk, Data 4 Good Festival. May 2021 (link)

  • AI, Bots and More. Interview in Nonprofit Pro. April 2021 (link)

  • How To Get Started with Chatbots in the Nonprofit Sector. NetHope Global Summit. October 2020 (link)

  • Developing a Conversational Agent With a Globally Distributed Team: An Experience Report. International Online Conference on Global Software Engineering 2020. June 2020 (pdf)

  • Meeting Urgent Needs With Chatbots. Conference talk, Global Digital Development Forum. May 2020 (link)

  • Helping organizations provide real time information about COVID-19 with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. Blogpost, Microsoft. April 2020 (link)

  • How Will Artificial Intelligence Shape the Future of Work? Blogpost, the Royal Society of the Arts. March 2020 (article)

  • Conversational AI: a Partner in the Future of Work. Comm Lead Connects conference on The Future of Work, University of Washington. March 2020 (link)

  • Applying Conversational AI to Humanitarian Challenges. NetHope Global Summit, Puerto Rico. October 2019 (link)

  • Language as an interface: on creating engaging learning experiences with AI. Guest lecture in School of Computer Science at University College Dublin, Ireland. November 2018

  • AI for Good. Panel discussion at University College Dublin, Ireland. November 2018 (link)

  • Can AI be Used for Social Good? Interview with Global Innovation Exchange. September 2018 (link)

  • AI for Social Good. Guest lecture at Global Innovation Exchange, Bellevue, WA. July 2018

  • Así aprenden idiomas las máquinas para ser nuestros traductores. Interview with El País for the program El Futuro es Apasionante. May 2018 (video)

  • Mispronunciation Detection in Children's Reading of Sentences. Journal of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, March 2018 (pdf)

  • Discovering Canonical Indian English Accents: A Crowdsourcing-based Approach. In proceedings of LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (pdf)

  • Doing Good Better with Artificial Intelligence. Blogpost, NetHope. March 2018 (link)

  • AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges. Panel discussion at the SXSW Education conference in Austin, TX, March 2018 (session)

  • Nuevas Oportunidades para el Aprendizaje en la Era de la Inteligencia Artificial. Keynote on new interfaces to learning at the Expo eLearning conference during Semana de la Educación in Madrid, Spain, March 2018 (session)

  • Interview with 20 Minutos about conversational AI in Skype. February 2018 (link)

  • Automatic Evaluation of Reading Aloud Performance in Children. Journal of Speech Communication. Elsevier, 2017 (pdf)

  • Detection of Mispronunciations and Disfluencies in Children Reading Aloud. In proceedings of Interspeech 2017, Stockholm, Sweden (pdf)

  • Automatic Evaluation of Children Reading Aloud on Sentences and Pseudowords. In proceedings of Interspeech 2017, Stockholm, Sweden (pdf)

  • STREAMLInED Challenges: Aligning Research Interests with Shared Tasks. In proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, ICLDC 2017, Honolulu Hawai`i (pdf)

  • Design and Analysis of a Database to Evaluate Children's Reading Aloud Performance. Winner of Best Paper award, PROPOR 2016, Tomar, Portugal. Chapter in Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, Springer (pdf)

  • Personalizing Cortana: a close-up view of the speech technology powering Cortana, in IEEE Speech and Language Processing, November, 2014 (link)

  • Exploring Tomorrow Together: on the Impact of Collaboration between Academia and Industry. Keynote at SUWMIAC - Summer Workshop on Applied Computing, 2014, Lisbon, Portugal

  • Correlating ASR Errors with Developmental Changes in Speech Production: A Study of 3-10-Year-Old European Portuguese Children's Speech. In proceedings of Interspeech Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI) 2014, Singapore (pdf)

  • Improving Speech Recognition through Automatic Selection of Age Group Specific Acoustic Models. Winner of Best Paper award. In proceedings of PROPOR 2014, São Carlos, Brazil (Springer) (pdf)

  • Automatically Recognising European Portuguese Children's Speech: Pronunciation Patterns Revealed by an Analysis of ASR Errors. In proceedings of PROPOR 2014, São Carlos, Brazil (Springer) (pdf)

  • Workshops Held at the First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing: A Report. Report from the first AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP), AI Magazine, Vol. 35, 2014 (pdf)

  • A Corpus-Based Study between Elderly and Young Speakers of European Portuguese: Acoustic Correlates and their Impact on Speech Recognition Performance. In proceedings of Interspeech 2013, Lyon, France (pdf)

  • Evaluating Voice Quality and Speech Synthesis Using Crowdsourcing. In proceedings of International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue 2013, Plzen, Czech Republic (pdf)

  • Cross-Language Acoustic Modeling. Guest lecture at University of Washington, Seattle, USA. 2011

  • Mobile Voice Search, Seminar on Natural Language Processing on Mobile Devices, 2010, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

  • Phonetic Knowledge in Automatic Speech Recognition. Guest lecture, 2008, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

  • Accent Features and Idiodictionaries: On Improving Accuracy for Accented Speakers in ASR. Ph.D. dissertation, 2007, University College London, England (pdf)

  • What Speech Technology Can Teach Us About Accent Variation. In Workshop on Accent, Variation and Change 2006, University College London, England

  • Pronunciation Variation Modelling using Accent Features. In proceedings of Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal (pdf)

  • How to Build an Italian Speech Recogniser Without Italian Speech Data. Phonetics and Linguistics Ph.D. Day seminar, 2005, University College London, England

  • Phonological Adaptation using Accent Features in Automatic Speech Recognition. In the journal Speech, Hearing and Language, 2004, London, England

  • Accent Features for Pronunciation Dictionary Adaptation in ASR. Proceedings of CamLing conference, 2004, University of Cambridge, England

  • Using Accent Dictionaries in Automatic Speech Recognition. Alumni Reunion conference, 2003, University College London, England

  • Rustica Romana Lingua. MA thesis about the phonological evolution of late Latin and the Romance languages, 1999, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

  • Techniques and Conventions in Spoken Language Transcription. Symposium on Studies in Spoken French, 1998, University of Copenhagen, Denmark