🌍 Advancing African NLP and Design Justice: DSFSI at NAACL 2025 & Global Humanities Collaborations
Spotlighting groundbreaking research on African language technologies and global dialogues on ethical, inclusive AI design.
🧠 DSFSI at NAACL 2025: Two Papers Accepted!
We're proud to share that DSFSI researchers Prof. Vukosi Marivate and Dr. Idris Abdulmumin are co-authors on two papers accepted at the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025).
1. AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages
This paper presents one of the most comprehensive datasets to date on hate speech and offensive content across 15 African languages, enabling more inclusive content moderation research and tools.
2. Pula: Training Large Language Models for Setswana (Led by Nathan Brown of Clemson University)
The Pula-8B model is the first 8-billion-parameter LLM fine-tuned for Setswana-English, outperforming larger models like LLaMA-3-70B on low-resource NLP benchmarks. It also introduces SetsText, the largest public Setswana web corpus.
🧭 DESIGN JUSTICE AI Post-Institute Symposium & Public Celebration
The DESIGN JUSTICE AI team wraps up the 2024 Global Humanities Institute with a powerful Post-Institute Symposium, showcasing four cutting-edge sessions on AI, justice, and the humanities.
🗓️ May 9, 2025 | In-person & Online Events
Symposium Schedule (Eastern Time, USA):
10:00 AM: Why the Local Matters
Featuring Vukosi Marivate (University of Pretoria) & Happy Buzaaba (Princeton), exploring the ethics and politics of “low-resource” African languages in NLP.12:00 PM: Design Justice Network Panel
On community-rooted approaches to ethical tech (with lunch served in-person).2:00 PM: Ontologies of Design Justice
With Dalaki Livingston and Chloë Kitzinger discussing Indigenous and literary frameworks.4:00 PM: Benchmarking Machine Intelligence
A dialogue with Webb Keane, Lauren Goodlad, and Matthew Stone on how the humanities reshape how we understand AI.
🔗 [Full Schedule & Registration Link]
🎉 DESIGN JUSTICE AI DiscoTECH @ Zimmerli Art Museum
📍 Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ
🗓️ Friday, May 9, 2025 | 2–6 PM (Keynote at 11:30 AM)
An open, family-friendly celebration of art, technology, and justice.
Enjoy exhibitions by Rutgers' DESIGN JUSTICE LAB Fellows, music, community-building, and snacks — culminating in a keynote by acclaimed artist Molly Crabapple.
Bring your questions, your kids, and your curiosity.
🗃️ Explore the archive of the Global Humanities Institute:
[Link to archive]