Karla Monterroso is committed to closing the opportunity gap for Black and Latinx people. In 2015, Debrett's HK 100 named De Kai as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong. His undergraduate degree at UCSD was awarded cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and won the liberal arts oriented Revelle College's department award. De Kai also holds an executive MBA from Kellogg (Northwestern University) and HKUST. His PhD dissertation employing maximum entropy to model human perception and interpretation of ambiguities was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward today's state-of-the-art statistical natural language processing technologies. His recent work explores the potential of cognitive machines that learn the relationships between various different kinds of musical languages.ĭuring his doctoral studies in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics at Berkeley, he worked on seminal projects on intelligent conversational dialog agents. At Berkeley he subsequently designed digital additive synthesis chips. Several years later, he began studying computer music at the UCSD Center for Music Experiment and Related Research (CME / CRCA). In parallel with music performance and theory, De Kai began building analog synths at the age of 12. At Berkeley he studied West African polyrhythms prior to years of intensive training on flamenco cajón with a wide range of top Spanish percussionists and dancers. A native of St Louis, he worked and traveled extensively in San Francisco, New York, Germany, Spain, China, India and Canada before joining Hong Kong's ambitious creation of Asia's now top-ranked HKUST, where he developed the foundations of modern statistical machine translation technology, with broad applications in computer music and computational musicology as well as human language processing, and built the world's first public web translation service resulting in global coverage.ĭe Kai's cross-disciplinary work relating music, language, intelligence, and culture stems from a liberal arts perspective emphasizing creativity in both technical and humanistic dimensions.Ī multi-instrumentalist songwriter classically trained at Northwestern University's School of Music, De Kai started piano and composing at age 4 while simultaneously immersed in the improvisational, rhythmic, conversational forms of Chicago's blues, soul and funk. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to machine learning of the cognitive relationships between different languages, De Kai is among only 17 scientists worldwide selected in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics to be awarded the honor of Founding ACL Fellow, and is a Distinguished Research Scholar at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. Ashanti was awarded a fellowship from the national organization CBMA - Campaign for Black Male Achievement and is currently a presidential fellow at Saybrook University.ĭe Kai is a Professor and a Musician. After completing a fellowship at the Stanford d.school in 2016, Ashanti, stepped away from working for a school district and began working as the Founding Executive Director for Ever Forward-Siempre Adelante in an effort to grow the organization to serve thousands of Bay Area students. The Ever Forward Club was featured last year in the documentary, “The Mask You Live In,” which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, Ever Forward has helped all of its more than 150 members graduate from high school, and 93% of them have gone on to attend two- or four-year colleges, military or trade school. In 2004, during Ashanti’s first year teaching high school math, he started The Ever Forward Club to provide support for African American and Latino males who were not achieving to their potential. A construction project manager in his first career, his life changed after he tutored struggling students and realized his passion for teaching. Raised in Oakland by a single mother on welfare, Ashanti left the inner city to study civil engineering at Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo. Ashanti Branch works to change how students, especially young men of color, interact with their education and how their schools interact with them.
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