🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Investigation & Connection: Natural Language Processing, Staying On Top of Internship Applications with Eamonn Burke, and Identifying and Addressing Bias in HCI with Kimi Wenzel!
👋 Announcements — Last Week of Classes!
Happy last week of classes! We hope the semester has been going well for everyone and that everyone is excited for break! This will be our last issue for the semester, so we wanted to wish everyone luck on their finals. See you next semester! 🥳🤩
Editor’s note: Join us in congratulating Auldyn Matthews, one of our former interviewees, for joining the CMU HCII as an Assistant Teaching Professor! 🎉
Check out our interview with her here!
🐒 Campus Compass — Natural Language Processing
How can computers understand human languages? Do they have a perfect Duolingo streak? Did they take language classes in high school? While that would be cool, the real reason is even cooler! Take a look at 11-411 Natural Language Processing being offered next semester where you can learn about how computers are trained to translate, extract, summarize, and more in the world of natural language processing!
👨💻 11-411 Natural Language Processing (NLP)
🤔 What is NLP?
This course will introduce students to the highly interdisciplinary area of Artificial Intelligence known alternately as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics. The course aims to cover the techniques used today in software that does useful things with text in human languages like English and Chinese. Applications of NLP include automatic translation between languages, extraction and summarization of information in documents, question answering and dialog systems, and conversational agents.
🧐 What do you do in NLP?
Modern NLP relies heavily on Machine Learning, so the basics of discrete classification and probabilistic modeling will be gone over throughout the course. Rapid prototyping will be emphasized from a software engineering perspective. NLP will introduce students to some high-level languages (e.g. regular expressions, Dyna) and some scripting languages (e.g. Python, Perl) that can simplify prototype implementation.
😯 Who should take NLP?
NLP has 15-122 listed as a prerequisite.
😎 Student Spotlight - Staying on Top of Internship Applications with Eamonn Burke
Getting into the internship application mindset? Feeling overwhelmed and don’t know where to start? This week, we talked to Eamonn Burke, a senior entering the UX industry, about how to stay cool during the internship application process and prioritize your own passions, and how to avoid getting lost in the wide world of the UX industry. ✊
I wish I’d known that that linear progression isn’t as important. I think of it now more as finding my own way. That’s what’s actually important: trying things out for yourself, rather than just building and building progressively, feeling like it’s too late to change or try something else.
— Eamonn Burke
🤩 Student Spotlight — Identifying and Addressing Bias in HCI with Kimi Wenzel
What does bias look like in different kinds of technology? How can we go about preventing and reversing the effects of bias in technology? In last week’s Archive and Collection issue, a lot of great articles and resources were shared about ethical HCI. This week join us in our talk with Kimi Wenzel about bias in language technology and how we can address such biases! 🧐
It's easy to pinpoint the discrimination and say that it’s bad, but I want to know how that is actually affecting people.
— Kimi Wenzel
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sophie McGrady, Caleb Sun, and Rebecca Jiang.
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