I recently came across this question, and really it got me thinking. It took me a while to write this, but I felt it was **important** to do so XD.
The democratization of Machine Learning (ML) is the most important for me. By democratization, I mean having access to quality courses to learn and do projects in Machine Learning globally. My specific focus is to democratize Natural Language Processing (NLP), meaning to make AI models understand the languages we speak. But why democratize NLP? There are 6,500 languages in the world and several dialects. Yet, most of the NLP researchers only research on the English language. One apparent reason for this is the popularity of English as it is the most spoken language, but Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish are the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th most spoken languages globally. Another reason is language mixing. Many of us who speak multiple languages switch seamlessly between them in conversations. We even mix multiple languages in one sentence. Humans can easily understand this mixing, but for computers, this is a nightmare. This mixing poses yet another challenge for researchers and engineers to make computers understand these languages.
I'm a part of the Social Computing Lab of my college and studied social media data for more than a year. During the last year, I've learned tons of methods to collect and analyze data ethically. However, when I started to work on this language mixing problem, I saw that no resource was available. Moreover, techniques to work on such data were scattered all across the internet. It took me weeks to build a simple tool to analyze mixed language text.
I realized the need for such a library and started to make one. I planned to keep the software free of cost and open-source to aid my aim of democratizing NLP. I further teamed up with a few of my friends to make an app in which you input text and understand it, and this would enable the general public to give feedback on our work. We went one more step further uploaded all of the models on the biggest open-source community for NLP, Huggingface. Anyone who wants to work on a mix of languages can directly find these models and work with them.
Any influential leader we see today saw a problem first and passionately worked towards it. I aim to not only solve this problem but to inspire more people to solve such issues and make the world a better place!
You can check our work here,
Thanks for reading. Do share what's most important to you as well in the comments below!