Lucie-Aimée Kaffee

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee

NLP and Knowledge Graphs Researcher

Wikimedia Hackathon 2018 (Barcelona, Spain)

1 minute read

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The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual event for the technical Wikimedia community to come together and hack on common projects.

It’s been the third year that I attended the hackathon, and it is one of my favourite Wikimedia events: The community works on projects for a weekend, there is always someone around to help you with a quick fix to a problem you have been working on since forever and the atmosphere is generally exciting and full of enthusiasm.

Over the time I have been attending, I can see an increase in effort to support newcomers, which I welcome. It is great to see how people engage with new contributers and encourage them to work on their own projects.

In the mix of projects and exchanging with old and new friends, there is a set of sessions on technical topics, increasingly Wikidata related. This is a very exciting part to me as I am able to keep up with the new developments.

One of those new, exciting developments is lexicographical data for Wikidata.

Adding linguistic information to Wikidata is intuitive, and it is great to see the first steps in that direction. This makes the hackathon very exciting; actually being able to discuss those topics in person.

I am looking forward to next year in Prague!

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Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 (Prague, Czechia)

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The Wikimedia hackathon is an event to bring together the technical community, that works on the MediaWiki code and technical projects around Wikipedia, Wikidata, WikiSource, and all the other Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia hackathon 2019 took place in Prague. It has been my fourth time at the hackathon, and it is still one of my favorite events of the Wikimedia events and certainly my favorite hackathon ever. As someone that was there for the first time said: “It is not a typical hackathon, it is more about the people.”

ESWC 2018 (Crete, Greece)

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For the second time, I attended the ESWC conference - this time in Crete. It was great to see known faces again and meet researchers in the field of semantic web.

NAACL 2018 (New Orleans, USA)

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NAACL was the first conference in the area of computational linguistics that I was able to attend. It was very interesting, as many topics are very relatable. It is an interesting mix of students and professors working on linguistics and machine learning problems and combining those two. It was also the biggest conference in academia that I have attended thus far. It was interesting to see the different concepts of such a big conference- for example, most papers were presented as posters, even full research papers. This made interaction with authors much easier and allowed for individually discussion of the topics. Many topics were fascinating to me, as many authors tried to solved challenges provided by working on under-resourced languages. Especially in the area of machine learning this brings a lot of challenges, I was happy to be able to discuss. Further, I had interesting discussions on the topic of code-switching, when user speak one language and use words from a different language in it (e.g. Hindi speakers using English words), a topic I have been following with interest.

The Web Conference 2018 (Lyon, France)

3 minute read

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The Web Conference is one of the most established conferences in the field of research around the web. I had the opportunity to attend this year’s version of it. Below are some of my personal highlights summarized.