Vivi Nastase

I am currently a research associate in the Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics (CLCL) group at the University of Geneva/Idiap Research Institute, Martigny (Switzerland), and former Machine Learning consultant in the NCCR Evolving language. I am also a member of the SciFilmIt organization which focuses on science communication, because I truly (and possibly also a bit naively) believe that should we all know a bit more about all areas of science, we would get a wonderful big picture about the world, how it works, how interconnected everything is, and that would hopefully discourage many from interfering with and destroying these fascinating and crucial connections.

I mostly write code and papers, but I am also currently working on a film project! Check out Puppets of a Digital Brain!, a short (-ish ...) film about the technology behind generativeAI, its good and bad sides.

With my friend Rada Mihalcea, we wrote some children's books about word etymologies:

The book contains etymologies for about 50 frequently used English words, to illustrate how creative people are, in this case about language, and how interesting and sometimes funny the stories of words are. If you are curious, here is the index, and a few pages.

The book contains etymologies for about 50 frequently used Romanian words -- in Romanian. It is not quite a translation of the English version, the list of words is a bit different. If you are curious, here is the index, and a few pages.

I also write serious stuff.

Semantic relations are the connections we perceive between things which interact. The book explores two, now intertwined, threads in semantic relations: how they are expressed in texts and what role they play in knowledge repositories.

I believe strongly in the power of science communication, and that Science is not finished until it is communicated and not only to peers!. As a member of SciFilmIt, I organize events for making short films about science topics, either for active learning (with teenagers in highschools), or for science communication with the public (with researchers in universities).