Gustavo Fonseca Ribeiro
Youth Ambassador, Internet Society
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Gustavo Fonseca Ribeiro is one of fifteen Youth Ambassadors for the Internet Society in the year of 2024. He holds a Master of Public Policy in Digital Technology from Sciences Po, and is a lawyer with expertise in digital/AI governance and digital development. He's worked for FAIR Forward - AI for All in Rwanda, a program by the GIZ aimed at advancing AI ecosystems in Africa and Asia. Currently, he's a Specialist Consultant for AI and Digital Transformation at UNESCO Headquarters.
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The Human Rights Impact of Underrepresented Languages in AI
AI continues to shape industries and innovation. Language plays a critical role in expanding the reach and capabilities of natural language processing tasks and generative AI models. However, many languages are still underrepresented in training datasets. These are called "low-resource languages." For example, the Common Crawl is a free and open repository of web crawl data, widely used for the training of large language models. Yet, 46.5% of its documents are primarily in English. This is followed by Russian, German, Japanese and Spanish; each comprising around 5% of the dataset. According to UNESCO, there are over 8300 languages worldwide; whereas the Common Crawl contains only 160 languages.
AI systems trained in a diverse set of languages is a precondition for advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age. This session, "The Human Rights Impact of Underrepresented Languages in AI: The Unspoken South," will explore this issue by identifying problems and mapping solutions. First, it will underscore policy and societal implications of language underrepresentation in AI systems. This will include the impacts to cultural rights under international human rights law. This is, specifically, the rights to take part in cultural life; to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress; to benefit from the protection of scientific, literary or artistic production, including the protection of traditional knowledge. Moreover, the session will cover AI-specific policy implications, such as bias, fairness and safety. Second, the session will highlight lines of action to solve the challenge. This may include (1) the creation of incentive systems for people to contribute with data ethically; (2) awareness-raising to mainstream the topic within the digital rights agenda; (3) advocacy to unlock access to language datasets for communities that are culturally-associated with the data therein; and (4) co-designing copyright licenses that attend to the socioeconomic needs of low-resource language communities affected by AI.
Youth Takeover: Building Future Internet Leaders
The Internet is a wonderful resource that provides opportunities to people around the globe. It transforms our lives and society for the better and belongs to each and every one of us.
But the Internet faces threats on multiple fronts. That is why the Internet Society, together with partners, offers a range of programs to equip and empower the next generation of Internet leaders—to grow and strengthen the Internet for everyone who needs it, benefiting the world’s diverse populations equitably. The future of the Internet is in your hands.
This session will feature a moderator and a diverse panel of 3-4 Internet Society Youth Ambassadors and/or Internet Society Alumni representing regions around the globe who will share their stories, speak about their successes in Internet governance, and share how youth are shaping conversations around the Internet.
We will also touch on how our programs prepare diverse cohorts of fellows to expand their knowledge, develop their careers, and make their voices heard to shape the future of the Internet.
The session will include an audience participation portion to gather questions and comments from the audience. It will inspire them to start or continue their involvement in the Internet space and work to keep the Internet open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy.
Africa Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF) Sessionize Event
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