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Cristina Aranda: “We have to hack the stereotypes that still exist in workplace teams”

15.12.2022

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Cristina Aranda, linguist and co-founder of the Big Onion technology company, during her WISE talk at CNIO. / A. Tabernero. /CNIO


The co-founder of the digital solutions company Big Onion gave a talk on diversity as the main lever in innovation, as part of the seminars organised by CNIO’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Office

“I became a linguist to get rich,” said Cristina Aranda in a provocative tone, referring to the boom experienced by this area through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the need for machines to understand human speech

“We should start by giving a greater presence in educational content to women who have made significant advances, and who are not currently mentioned”, she said

Cristina Aranda began her talk in the Margarita Salas Auditorium of the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) by breaking stereotypes: “I became a linguist to get rich”. Aranda comes from the world of humanities, an area that the collective imagination associates more with libraries than the technology boom and business. But Aranda is also the co-founder of Big Onion, a digital solutions company that designs “exponential technology strategies”; as well as Mujeres Tech; the ELLIS Alicante Centre dedicated to Artificial Intelligence (AI); and the Spain AI Aragon community. In fact, in her talk, Aranda showed that in the age of human-machine communication, linguistics has become one of the most in demand disciplines.

“Science knows the world, technology transforms it,” said Aranda, who is also considered one of the most influential women in Spain in both the technological and entrepreneurial sectors. Her talk, given as part of the seminars organised by the CNIO Women in Science and Engineering Office entitled Diversity, the main lever in innovation, focused on Artificial Intelligence. Her main message: it is crucial that AI learns from people of different sexes, cultures, origins, religions.

Aranda explained the basics of AI and how it draws from data. “We live at a time when more and more data is being produced,” she said. With this data, machines learn. This learning can be supervised by people, or it can be the machine itself that feeds back and learns. This latter approach is known as deep learning, “which is the most frightening option,” said the speaker, “because it assumes that the machine makes decisions; what we have to see is which variables determine those decisions”.

As well as data, AI also depends on language, which means that “linguistics is on the rise as a speciality, very much in demand, because language has become a driver of technology”, said Cristina Aranda

She insisted that there is still a lot to be done: “In Spain, we have to work on data quality”. Why do automated translation providers usually translate “nurse” in Spanish as female and “doctor” as male? Why is “a leading figure in medicine” usually assigned a male gender?

With regard to education, the expert stated that “teaching related to computational language has not yet been included in the Language Studies courses taught at universities (…) we have to seek this knowledge in other fields, in postgraduate studies or in masters courses taught at some universities”, she added.

To encourage more women into technology, Cristina Aranda believes that “women who have made significant progress, and who are not even mentioned at the moment, must be given greater presence in educational content.”

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