Ep 18. Timothy Pistotti: NLP & Linguistics PhD Student on LLMs, languages, and multi-discipline collaborations

Tim is a PhD student across the School of Computer Science and the School of Cultures, Languages, and Linguistics at the University of Auckland. He is part of the research groups Strong AI and NAOInstitute. Tim’s research is in generating data for low-resource languages to train large language models. As large language models become a more and more powerful tool (case in point Chat-GPT), it is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives. So it is great to see that there is an effort to make this tool available for wider users. Tim grew up surrounded by foreign exchange students at home, and perhaps because of that he has always been interested in traveling and languages. After his undergraduate at the University of California, he taught and traveled for a while before settling in New Zealand to pursue a Masters in Linguistics. After his Masters, he joined a company as a linguistics researcher. There he identified various AI applications he wanted to try out and he started picking up skills to do so. With these ideas, he approached the university to study a PhD where he is today.  In this episode, I had a great conversation with Tim about his research for low-resource languages, Tim’s love for languages and linguistics, and  being a bridge between Linguistics and Computer science and how more and more of these bridges are being built across multiple disciplines, and much more.  Make sure to check out the “AI: Now and Future” symposium by NAOI to get a chance to listen to some interesting talks and sit next to Tim! 🔗 Relevant links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-pistotti-a2685b95/ https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/science/our-research/naoinstitute.html https://aiforum.org.nz/event/ai-now-and-future-a-symposium-by-naoi/