On Monday, January 26, we held a workshop for incoming students from different degree programs at FAMAF (UNC), led by Marcos Gómez and Guido Ivetta. The activity took place in two sessions, in the morning and in the afternoon, with a total of 700 students participating.
Auditing language models from our local contexts
During the workshop, we reflected together with students on issues related to perceptions of language models and AI. In particular, we focused on the importance of auditing different AI applications and on critically examining the dependence on these models in problem-solving processes. To do so, we used EDIA, the platform we developed as part of a joint project with Mozilla, which includes various tools for auditing AI systems. On this occasion, we worked with the “Typical Phrases” module, using regional expressions. This allowed participants to audit how language models respond to phrases that are typical of our local contexts, cities, or provinces. The activity began by entering a typical word or phrase, sharing its meaning in the local context and how it is commonly used in sentences, and then examining and comparing the responses generated by three different language models.
Student participation and experiences
In the morning session, around 500 students took part and shared their experiences using language models in school activities. In the afternoon, the workshop continued with the participation of approximately 200 students.
Based on the question “What kinds of tasks did you use applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or others for at school?”, we collected 324 responses from 305 participants, which were summarized in the following word cloud:
Infrastructure, scale, and data sovereignty
This work, and the scale at which it was carried out, would not have been possible without the infrastructure and support provided by the UNC Supercomputing Center (CCAD-UNC). The team granted us access to their infrastructure so that three language models could respond to queries made by more than 400 people simultaneously. They also adapted different environments within their infrastructure to improve response times.
We would like to especially thank the UNC Supercomputing Center (CCAD-UNC) team, in particular its director, Nicolas Wolovick, and Alejandro Ismael Silva, for all the work they carried out.
This collaboration with CCAD-UNC not only makes it possible to scale our tools, but also strengthens data sovereignty. The EDIA interface is hosted on a server in San Francisco, Córdoba, while queries to the language models are processed on the UNC Supercomputing Center’s machines, located in Ciudad Universitaria, in the city of Córdoba. As a result, our data remains in our country and does not leave computers located in our province.