Sakriani Sakti (JAIST/NAIST, Japan)

Biography
I am currently an associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) Japan, an adjunct associate professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) Japan, visiting research scientist at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligent Project (RIKEN AIP) Japan, and adjunct professor at the University of Indonesia. I have been actively involved in international collaboration activities such as Asian Pacific Telecommunity Project (2003-2007) and various multinational speech-to-speech translation research projects, including A-STAR and U-STAR (2006-2011). I am currently a committee member of the IEEE SLTC (2021-2023) and an associate editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2020-2023). I was a board member of Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and the general chair of SLTU 2016. I was also the general chair of the "Digital Revolution for Under-resourced Languages (DigRevURL)" Workshop as the Interspeech Special Session in 2017 and DigRevURL Asia in 2019. I was on the organizing committee of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2019 and 2020. I was also involved in creating a joint ELRA and ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) and currently serves as the SIGUL chair and ISCA liaison representative. In 2019, in collaboration with UNESCO and ELRA, I was on the organizing committee of the International Conference of "Language Technologies for All (LT4All): Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide".

Motivations to being a candidate for ELRA Board
Language is a structured system of communication. It involves our values, identity, and beliefs. For many years, ELRA has made efforts to make language resources for human language technologies available to the community. However, as I originally come from Indonesia, an archipelago with more than 300 ethnic groups that speak more than 700 ethnic languages, I understand entirely that the availability of data resources and technologies is still unbalanced across all languages worldwide. Furthermore, I am aware that the availability of language resources is mostly text, and other modalities like speech and image still need to be improved. Therefore, it is critical to put more effort into enhancing the availability of language resources across different languages and modalities, and I would be happy if I could support those activities within ELRA.

Wishes and plans for the future of the association
If elected, I’ll try my best to continue the efforts to promote under-resourced languages through ELRA activities in general or ELRA/ISCA SIGUL activities in particular. I would also like to contribute to making the presence of ELRA more valuable in the international community. Furthermore, I would like to dedicate my life to supporting the community, preserving languages and cultures, constructing data resources, and accelerating the development of speech and language technologies in line with the United Nations’ declaration of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032). One of the plans is to continue organizing LT4All as ELRA and SIGUL serial events in collaboration with UNESCO to increase awareness of the importance of language resources and technologies, celebrate success, and discuss the remaining problems with various experts worldwide. Last but not least, I would also bridge communication between countries and institutes, linguistics and engineering, and researchers of natural language processing and spoken language processing to establish collaborations that could provide a better future for language resources and human language technologies.

Official affiliation and URL to my professional activities

Sakriani Sakti
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Graduate School of Advanced Science and Technology
School of Information Science
Human-AI Communication, Co-Learning,
& Collaborative Intelligence Research Laboratory
Address: 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292
Phone: (+81)-761-51-1235
Email: ssakti [at] jaist.ac.jp

Website:
https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/sakti-lab/index.html
https://www.jaist.ac.jp/~ssakti/index.html