For the next two weeks, we are visiting FU-Berlin and BBAW discussing cooperation between our Kone foundation-funded Acatea project and various local projects, especially the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/home).
Nice 4km walk around the Prästgården in sunny -20C.
Interested in developing LLMs that work for dialectal Arabic? Introducing the AMIYA shared task: Arabic Modeling In Your Accent, just accepted to VarDial 2026. Please consider submitting and joining us in Morocco if you do! sites.google.com/view/vardial...
On Tuesday, Research Council of Finland granted me Academy research fellow funding for four years to continue my core research in a project called ”Unseen Languages in Language Identification”: tiedejatutkimus.fi/fi/results/f...
It’s ChatGPT talking with Dalle. It’s nice how chatgpt doesn’t have access to the image actually created and supposes the thing is what was asked for. We had a nice dialogue with it about a picture we wanted as one can give it the picture and ask it how does it think it corresponds to request. :)
Bluesky cannot replace Facebook function until there are ”friends-only” posts and the number of pictures is not limited to four. Is Mastodon any different in that respect? I think I tried it some years back.
Winter 2025 in Fiskars.
Some highlights from the second day of the DRDHum 2024 conference (sites.uef.fi/drd-hum-2024/).
Blue skies over Burgundy today.
The skies are not just blue at Karis tonight.
Winter is slowly turning into Spring at Fiskars.
Our book, "Automatic Language Identification in Texts", was finally published by Springer Nature at the beginning of this year: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
I think I started to write parts of it already 13 years ago. :)
Happy new year from Raseborg!
Sunshine around Mustionjoki today.
Blue skies with some nice mist over the sea at Helsinki this morning.
Yesterday we were listening to a few nice inaugural lectures by the new professors at the University of Helsinki.
St. Cathrine’s church at Karis today, few minutes after sunset. During its over 500 years standing there it has seen many days colder than today, but it was still quite cold enough for me with -19 during the morning hours…
The keepers of flame
It’s ”Kiovia” in Latin, and there’s at least one dissertation from Turku (år 1690) in Latin which (maybe mis) spelled it ”Kiova”. It used to be ”Kiow” or ”Kiov” in Finland Swedish newspapers before 1809 even though nowadays it’s ”Kiev” in Swedish.
Yesterday I was visiting the National Library for some nice vin chaud. Sampo from the TurkuNLP, one of their "customers" of the year, revealed that they have a website where people can help developing their Finnish LLM to have a chatGPT like dialogue capabilities. So let's help! :) avoin-avustaja.fi
Attending the monthly Finnish Egyptological Society (www.egyptologinenseura.fi/english/ ) meeting where Dr. Lena Tambs (researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/l...) is presenting ”Bringing the Past to Life with Ancient Texts and Network Science”
Blue skies at Raseborg today with -10 degrees Celsius.