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All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Hanna Bohlin Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #5 9 August 2016 SKRONK #6 23 August 2016 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

Gravesend Innovation Showcase 2024 events, locations, talks, speakers and times. < Back Doraraathara Start Time 18:00 Running Time 40 Minutes Location 14. The Grand GYG Event Type Demonstration About the Event Introduction Doraraathara is an audio visual performance and generative artwork exploring plurality, technology and the politics of creation in a digital context. The work challenges audiences to rethink the link between originality, value and beauty in the hyper-real contemporary landscape. Event info: Using visual art generated from a custom-built audio visual system, and live spoken word performance, the visual outputs are original and unique to the occasion, responsive and reflective of the experience shared by the audience and creators. Creative Technologist Kristian Jones will share the process of creation, and technology underpinning the live audio visual experience, before inviting audiences to consider their own digital futures in a 10-minute performance of Doraraathara with Jen Bell. Followed by a Q&A with the creators facilitated by Zack Davies from Holy Moly Poetry/Fourth Portal More on the event lead Doraraathara is an audio visual performance and generative artwork exploring plurality, technology and the politics of creation in a digital context. The work challenges audiences to rethink the link between originality, value and beauty in the hyper-real contemporary landscape. Event info: Using visual art generated from a custom-built audio visual system, and live spoken word performance, the visual outputs are original and unique to the occasion, responsive and reflective of the experience shared by the audience and creators. Creative Technologist Kristian Jones will share the process of creation, and technology underpinning the live audio visual experience, before inviting audiences to consider their own digital futures in a 10-minute performance of Doraraathara with Jen Bell. Followed by a Q&A with the creators facilitated by Zack Davies from Holy Moly Poetry/Fourth Portal. Event Information This event is free. Open to all ages. Warning: Flashing images and occasional loud sounds. Q&A ___ Even more information ___ Let’s enter Doraraathara Neither destination Or home Step in to Doraraathara Never be alone Infinite Doraraathara Unlimited choice A narrative Vending machine A Personalised Voice Doraraathara’s your partner Your intimate Your twin Your personalised Agent Your digital kin Take the red pill Or the blue pill Side step and go for green When you’re creating reality Choose the familiar Or unseen Previous Next

< Back SeamlessM4T Massively Multilingual And Multimodal Machine Translation While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. Meta Facebook 22 Aug 2023 What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems composed of multiple subsystems performing translation progressively, putting scalable and high-performing unified speech translation systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T—Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation—a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations, dubbed SeamlessAlign. Filtered and combined with human labeled and pseudo-labeled data (totaling 406,000 hours), we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On Fleurs, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous state-of-the-art in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. On CVSS and compared to a 2-stage cascaded model for speech-to-speech translation, SeamlessM4T-Large’s performance is stronger by 58%. Preliminary human evaluations of speech-to-text translation outputs evinced similarly impressive results; for translations from English, XSTS scores for 24 evaluated languages are consistently above 4 (out of 5). For into English directions, we see significant improvement over WhisperLarge-v2’s baseline for 7 out of 24 languages. To further evaluate our system, we developed Blaser 2.0, which enables evaluation across speech and text with similar accuracy compared to its predecessor when it comes to quality estimation. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks (average improvements of 38% and 49%, respectively) compared to the current state-of-the-art model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Compared to the state-of-the-art, we report up to 63% of reduction in added toxicity in our translation outputs. Finally, all contributions in this work—including models, inference code, finetuning recipes backed by our improved modeling toolkit Fairseq2, and metadata to recreate the unfiltered 470,000 hours of SeamlessAlign — are open-sourced and accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication . https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/seamlessm4t-massively-multilingual-multimodal-machine-translation/ For more: NLP, AI, Machine Learning, Audio, Standards Previous Next

< Back The Cloud Under The Sea The industry responsible for laying the cables for the internet traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, under-appreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists. The Verge 19 Apr 2024 Want a career connecting the world? An immersive long read about laying the cables that the internet and we all rely upon. The home of the Fourth Portal, St Andrew's Church, is dedicated to those who work and travel the seas. This excellent long read follows the journey of those who repair the cables of the worldwide internet, revealing a fascinating life and opportunities for employment to see a whole new world. ___ "St Andrew's Waterside Church Mission for Sailors, Fishermen and Emigrants, 1864-1939 was established in 1864 to serve merchant seamen, fishermen and emigrants passing through the parish of Holy Trinity at Milton-next-Gravesend on 'sound Church principles', (ie 'high' or mainstream rather than 'low' church within the Church of England)." ( https://mar.ine.rs/stories/st-andrews-waterside-church-mission/ ) ___ “It hasn’t changed in 150 years... The Victorians did it that way and we’re doing it the same way.” "The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists. Others come to the field from merchant navies, marine construction, cable engineering, geology, optics, or other tangentially related disciplines. When Fumihide Kobayashi, the submersible operator — a tall and solidly built man from the mountain region of Nagano — joined KCS at the age of 20, he thought he would be working on ship maintenance, not working aboard a maintenance ship. He had never been on a boat before, but Hirai enticed him to stay with stories of all the whales and other marine creatures he would see on the remote ocean. Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon and enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times. The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. However, there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an ageing and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. “One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. He recalled another panel he was on in Singapore meant to introduce university students to the industry. “The audience was probably about 10 university kids and 60 old grey people from the industry just filling out their day,” he said. When he speaks with students looking to get into tech, he tries to convince them that subsea cables are also part — a foundational part — of the tech industry. “They all want to be data scientists and that sort of stuff,” he said. “But for me, I find this industry fascinating. You’re dealing with the most hostile environment on the planet, eight kilometres deep in the oceans, working with some pretty high technology, travelling all over the world. You’re on the forefront of geopolitics, and it’s critical for the whole way the world operates now.” The industry’s biggest recruiting challenge, however, is the industry’s invisibility. It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about fixing it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.” https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships For more: Security, Infrastructure Previous Next

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Tom Spurging Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #176 15 July 2025 SKRONK #177 2 September 2025 SKRONK #178 16 September 2025 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Ian MacLachlan Trombone Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs Flimflam 28 May 2025 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Andrea Bolzoni Guitar Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs ImproVox #01 8 July 2024 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Sophie Sleigh-Johnson Spoken Word, Electronics & Tapes Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs ImproVox #06 5 February 2025 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Isabel Anders Piano Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs London Improvisers Orchestra #38 9 July 2025 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Liv Vova Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #177 2 September 2025 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Dave O’Connor Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #4 19 July 2016 SKRONK #5 9 August 2016 SKRONK #1 31 May 2016 SKRONK #2 21 June 2016 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Ronnie McGrath Poetry Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs Boat-Ting Oct18 1 October 2018 Boat-Ting Oct 2018 http://Website or social media email or phone number