Frontier Fellow 2024-2025:
Michaela Barker
Title of Research Project: “Enhancing Digital Equity for the Earth’s Future: Bridging the Digital Divide with Languages of Resilience”
Summary:
Through a user-study of multilingual academic specialists and native speakers, this project strives to go beyond achieving fluency in machine translation and instead integrate contextual nuance to bridge both linguistic and cultural barriers within academia. By using large language models (LLMs) to assist in the translation of academically marginalized and low resourced languages within key disciplines, this endeavor aims to empower under-represented cultures and disseminate vital academic knowledge for a more connected future.
Michaela Barker is a second-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz pursuing a double major in Cognitive Science and Linguistics with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). She is interested in engaging with work in the digital humanities, particularly in application to the study of technology, computational linguistics, and consciousness, as well as the intersection of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. She has a background as a visual artist and designer, with her experience as a former game design major resulting in expertise in UI/UX design, motion graphics, and technical proficiencies in Python, CSS and HTML. Working with Professor Minghui Hu, Michaela’s role as an undergraduate researcher assistant pertains to facilitating communications within the “Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” research cluster, as well as contributing to the development of the AI Humanities Lab’s machine translation and data-mining engines.
