Public speaking

2021

• May 21: Response-ability Summit 2021 (upcoming) to co-moderate a panel along with Ken Bank, Head of Social Purpose, Yoti on Aadhaar
• March 8–19: [Mozilla Festival 2021]
  • Mar. 17 OpenSpeaks: Translating language documentation toolkit into an indigenous language, a session focused on the the language protection emergency in the light of UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL), and learning from documenting indigenous and endangered languages and cultures as a way forward for climate action and sustainable changes.
  • Mar. 18 “Multilingual films as digital rights teaching aids for activism in Asia-Pacific”.
• March 4-7: 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC). University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, US.
  • “An account of how critical information about privacy is missing in indigenous languages of India and ways to avoid it” (paper).
  • “Building networks of language digital activists for peer learning and knowledge exchange” (poster presentation, co-presenter: Eddie Avila)
• February 26: Workshop Story Time Cafe with Internet Master Storytellers by Mozilla (Moderator: Laura Vidal)
• January 25: Lecture in online MOOC titled “Linguistic Diversity, What for?” on Coursera by Linguapax, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Lecture titled “Rising Voices: Amplifying Marginalized Voices through Digital Language Activism”

2020

• November 19: “MarginalizedAadhaar: Aadhaar and exclusion of marginalised communities in India” as a part of course “Aadhar: India’s digital identity project for a billion people” taught by Prateek Sibal, Sciences Po, Paris.

• November 10: Internet Governance Forum 2020. “Data to Inclusion: Building datasets in African Languages” — a panel discussion highlighting the machine learning/artificial intelligence initiatives and other indigenous/endangered language revitalization efforts around the world and particularly in Africa. Highlighted three aspects — a) digital shift in governance and exclusion, b) use of Openness (specifically, open technology and open content) in furthering building resource for low-resource languages, and c) ambivalence of social media from the standpoints of both rights and as a language-promotion tool [ 🎬 recording • original submission ]
• October 22: Creative Commons Virtual Global Summit. “How social justice initiatives can further Creative Commons” — a session on how social justice researchers and rights advocate initiatives can find common grounds to contribute to Creative Commons. [ 📖 outcomes and reading ]
• October 20: Creative Commons Virtual Global Summit. “Building content from bottom up” — a hands-on session on documenting “consent-seeking” for diverse community practices for open content development and creating a conceptual framework. The outcomes of this session would contribute to the research under the ambit of project OpenSpeaks at the O Foundation that was supported through a Creative Commons Global Network Communities Activity Fund. [ 👨‍🏫 presentation ]
• September 2-3: eLife Innovation Sprint 2020. Contributed in strategy and development for project “Affordabee: Low-Cost Open Access Publishing” that is currently working towards building a resource hub for researchers from Africa and other developing regions where scholars face challenges with accessing academic research because of paywall.
• July 10: Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference. “Panel discussion: COVID-19 and the Wikimedia community”

2019

• August 9: DEF Dialogues, Digital Empowerment Foundation. “Digitally preserving marginalised languages”
• June 2: Keynote speaker at Global Voices Asia Pacific Summit 2019, Taipei, Taiwan panel: ”The rise and challenge of digital authoritarianism in the Asia Pacific“.
• May 11: Presented a session titled ”OpenSpeaks: Open Archives of the Voices of the Commons“ at Creative Commons Global Summit 2019, Lisbon, Portugal.

2018

• September: UNESCO organized an international conference for kicking off the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL) campaign. The conference titled “Role of Linguistic Diversity in Building a Global Community with Shared Future” was held in Changsha, China where I presented a paper titled ”Rising Voices: The Digital Possibilities for Marginalized Languages“
• National Geographic Citizen Science Workshop 2018, Hong Kong
• August: Wikimania 2018, Capetown, South Africa a wide participation detailed here
• Speaker, “Multi-stakeholder Model of Internet Governance Forum and Issues of Developing Countries”, Nepal Internet Governance Forum, Kathmandu, Nepal
• Organizer, “Internet Society Southeast Asia Focused Engagement Meeting”, Bangkok, Thailand
• Organizer, “2018 Internet Society Asia-Pacific & Middle East Chapters Meeting“, Kathmandu, Nepal

• Co-speaker, “How to create a digital archive for indigenous languages”, Celtic Knot Wikipedia Languages Conference 2018, The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales, UK
• Organizer, “2018 Internet Stakeholders Meeting”, Yangon, Myanmar

2017

• Speaker, “Digital collaboration to Save the Languages“, TEDxIBABangalore, Bengaluru, India
• Speaker, “Would you let a language die”, TEDxYouthAmaatraAcademy, Bengaluru, India
• Organizer, “2017 Internet Society Asia-Pacific Chapters Meeting”, Singapore

Kathabhidhana, an open source toolkit to record pronunciation of large chunks of words in any language, curate metadata and help grow one the basic building blocks—pronunciation library—that is needed for machine learning and Natural Language Processing. (Co-presented with Prateek Pattanaik at the Celtic Knot Conference 2017, University of Edinburgh UK; Organized a workshop at Wikimania 2017, Montreal, Canada)

• Speaker, Kathabhidhana: “Recording words for Wiktionary and preparing for an AI assistant”, Wikimania 2017, Montreal, Canada
• Speaker, “Kathabhidhana, open source toolkit to record pronunciations of any world language”. Celtic Knot Conference 2017, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
• Co-facilitator, Mozilla D&I Design Sprint 2017, Vancouver, Canada

2016

• Mozilla All Hands 2016, Hawaii, US
• All Things Open 2016, Raleigh, NC, US
• Talk “Cross-community collaboration in Localization”. FUEL GILT Conference 2016, New Delhi, India (video on YouTube)
• Panel lead and workshop. “How to better tell your Wikimedia community story using media as a tool”. WikiConference India 2016, Chandigarh, India