On 28 September, President of Latvia Egils Levits and President of Slovenia Borut Pahor visited the Jožef Stefan Institute, the leading Slovenian scientific research institute, where they discussed the development opportunities and potential risks associated with artificial intelligence.
A Memorandum of Cooperation in the field of digital development of small languages between the Institute and Latvian language technology company ‘Tilde’ was signed during the visit.
‘Language technology and data cooperation between ‘Tilde’ and Jožef Stefan Institute started a long time ago. This memorandum is just a natural step forward. Slovenian and Latvian language are facing the same challenges in terms of their position in the digital age, and both countries have prioritised the language technology development. Sharing of experience, technological cooperation, common position on EU multilingual policies will potentially be crucial for both countries. Future of Europe belongs to smart and sustainable technologies, and Latvia has been instrumental in development of multilingual artificial intelligence technologies in Europe,’ President of Latvia said.
Memorandum was signed on behalf of Latvia by language technology company ‘Tilde’ and Faculty of Computing of the University of Latvia represented by its Computational Linguistics Laboratory. Their Slovenian counterparts were Jožef Stefan Institute’s Department for Artificial Intelligence and University of Ljubljana Centre for Language Resources and Technology.
Jožef Stefan Institute operates the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence under the auspices of UNESCO, which oversees and coordinated research into how artificial intelligence can contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Centre is led by its co-founder Dr. Marko Grobelnik. President Levits invited Dr. Grobelnik to visit Latvia to build closer cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence.
The Jožef Stefan Institute is the leading Slovenian scientific research institute, covering a broad spectrum of basic and applied research. It is an internationally acclaimed research organisation known for its research and solutions in the field of language corpora and audio-visual data analysis, knowledge retrieval and analytics.