Agenda

My name is Dev Kumar Sunuwar. I have been appointed by UN Secretary General António Guterres as a member of the advisory 'Board of Trustees' of the UN Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples (UNVFIP)  for a three-year tenure, starting from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2023. I am a journalist and law practitioner in Nepal. I have written and covered extensively on International Human Rights and Issues concerning Asian Indigenous Peoples in national, regional and international forums and equally in media. I have good network and hands-on experience in the field of Asian Indigenous Peoples’ rights and issues. I come from Koits-Sunuwar, one of the 59 indigenous communities, legally recognized in Nepal. I have worked in radio, television, newspaper, magazine and online, assuming different posts including as investigative journalist.

I co-founded Indigenous Media Foundation, Indigenous Television (Nepal's, in fact south Asia's first and only indigenous community television) and a satellite television-ITVNepal and a couple of community radios in Nepal.Read more at: https://www.devkumarsunuwar.com.np/about-me

Reference: https://www.devkumarsunuwar.com.np/about-me

Dr. phil. Valts Ernštreits (1974) is the director of the University of Latvia Livonian institute and culture policy advisor to the minister of culture of the Republic of Latvia. For decades he has been involved in revitalization efforts of the Latvia’s indigenous language and one of the most endangered languages in the world – Livonian. Being Livonian himself he has been involved in numerous activities of safeguarding and developing Livonian cultural life and widening the possibilities of the use of Livonian. He has also advocated Livonian heritage and language in state and municipal level and promoting Livonian heritage in educational institutions, general public and Livonian community. Valts Ernštreits’ research interests include the building of digital resources and developing approaches for the research, safeguarding, and providing accessibility to the Livonian language and culture sources, as well as lexicography, language standardization and intangible heritage.

Sakriani Sakti is currently an associate professor at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) Japan, adjunct associate professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) Japan, visiting research scientist at RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligent Project (RIKEN AIP) Japan, and adjunct professor at the University of Indonesia.

She received her B.E. degree in Informatics (cum laude) from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia, in 1999. In 2000, she received DAAD-Siemens Program Asia 21st Century Award to study in Communication Technology, University of Ulm, Germany, and received her MSc degree in 2002. During her thesis work, she worked with the Speech Understanding Department, DaimlerChrysler Research Center, Ulm, Germany. She then worked as a researcher at ATR Spoken Language Communication (SLC) Laboratories Japan in 2003-2009, and NICT SLC Groups Japan in 2006-2011, which established multilingual speech recognition for speech-to-speech translation. While working with ATR and NICT, Japan, she continued her study (2005-2008) with Dialog Systems Group University of Ulm, Germany, and received her Ph.D. degree in 2008.

She is a member of JNS, SFN, ASJ, ISCA, IEICE, and IEEE. Furthermore, she is currently a committee member of IEEE SLTC (2021-2023) and an associate editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2020-2023). She was a board member of Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and the general chair of SLTU2016. She was also the general chair of the "Digital Revolution for Under-resourced Languages (DigRevURL)" Workshop as the Interspeech Special Session in 2017 and DigRevURL Asia in 2019. She was also the organizing committee of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2019 and 2020. She was also involved in creating joint ELRA and ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) and served as SIGUL Board since 2018. In 2019, in collaboration with UNESCO and ELRA, she was also the organizing committee of the International Conference of "Language Technologies for All (LT4All): Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide".

Her research interests lie in deep learning & graphical model framework, statistical pattern recognition, machine speech chain, zero-resourced speech technology, multilingual speech recognition and synthesis, spoken language translation, social-affective dialog system, and cognitive-communication.

Lovleen Chadha is currently a Data Value Manager at Nokia. An AI & Analytics evangelist, he is leading the Algo-Augmented Category Manager program at Nokia’s Strategic Sourcing.

Designed Nokia’s AI/ML skill building programs
AI-Aware-Employee (Machine learning bootcamps for employees with Zero Maths, Zero coding experience) 
DIGITALIST (9-month program for Citizen Data Scientists)
PMP, Lean Six Sigma Green belt, Certified Nokia Coach
Design Thinking practitioner
50 invention submissions resulting in 20 patent fillings (400+ citations by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Intel, IBM, Qualcomm & others).
Topics of Interest : Role-centric AI transformations, Data literacy, User Experience