The A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture Series enables students to engage with prominent faculty and well-known leaders in the field of computer science. The lecture series is named after Professor A. Nico Habermann, head of the computer science department between 1980 and 1988 and Founding Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

Lecture title: Responsible Thinking; An operational framework

Abstract: In a world of racing to get the best systems on leaderboards, winning best shared tasks, building the largest LM, are we losing our soul as a scientific enterprise? Do we need to re-orient and re-pivot NLP? If so, what is needed to make this happen? Can we chart together a program where we ensure that science is the pivotal ingredient in CL/NLP? Could Responsible NLP be an avenue that could lead us back towards that goal? In this talk, I will explore some “practical” ideas around framing a Responsible NLP vision hoping to achieve a higher scientific standard for our field, addressing issues from the “how” we conduct our research and venturing into the “what” we work on and produce using tenets from responsible mindset perspective. I will pose more questions than answers. This is a call to action, an invitation to start a real global community conversation, hopefully engaging all stakeholders: academia, industry, government and civic society.

About the Speaker: Mona Diab is the new Director of the LTI. She is also the director of the R3LIT lab at CMU. Prior to joining CMU, she was a Lead Responsible AI Research Scientist with Meta. She was also a full Professor of Computer Science at the George Washington University (on leave) where she directed the CARE4Lang NLP Lab. Before joining Meta, she led the Lex Conversational AI project within Amazon AWS AI. Her current focus is on Responsible AI and how to operationalize it for NLP technologies and AI in general. Her interests span building robust technologies for low resource scenarios with a special interest in Arabic technologies, (mis) information propagation, computational socio-pragmatics, computational psycholinguistics, NLG evaluation metrics, Language modeling and resource creation. Mona has served the community in several capacities: Elected President of SIGLEX and SIGSemitic, and she currently serves as the President for ACL SIGDAT, the board supporting EMNLP conferences. She has delivered tutorials and organized numerous workshops and panels around Arabic processing, Responsible NLP, Code Switching, etc. She is a cofounder of CADIM (Consortium on Arabic Dialect Modeling, previously known as Columbia University Arabic Dialects Modeling Group), in 2005, which served as a world renowned reference point on Arabic Language Technologies. Mona was just awarded the King Salman Global Arabic Academy Prize for Arabic Language Technologies for 2023. Moreover she helped establish two research trends in NLP, namely computational approaches to Code Switching and Semantic Textual Similarity. She is also a founding member of the *SEM conference, one of the top tier conferences in NLP. Mona has published more than 250 peer reviewed articles.