Translation

The second project, which began in October 2019 and concluded in 2022, is BETTER, which stands for Better Extraction from Text Towards Enhanced Retrieval. This tool is designed to cull information about global events and issues such as natural disasters and cross-country migration. BETTER allows someone to understand at a glance, for instance, the details of the COVID-19 pandemic response in another country, even if there is little English-language news coverage of the crisis.

Both MATERIAL and BETTER are now in the active research and development phase and yet to be

Before joining ISI in 2017, Boschee worked for 17 years at what is now Raytheon BBN Technologies, a research and development company in Cambridge, Mass. Boschee, who graduated from Harvard University in 2000 with a degree in computer science, knew nothing about the inner workings, of voice recognition technology when she was hired at BBN, but she was already its customer. In her late teens, she suffered a repetitive stress injury that was exacerbated by underlying structural issues, leaving her unable to type. At the time, she used what was then painfully slow voice recognition technology to turn her words into text.

The condition eased in her mid-20s, but when Boschee had a recent flare-up and returned to programming by voice for a few weeks, she got to experience how far the technology had come.

Now, as a research team leader at ISI, Boschee knows all about how voice recognition and other natural language technology works.

“The world is getting smaller in terms of our ability to learn what is happening around the globe, but there’s still so much information out there that’s hidden behind language barriers,” Boschee says. “We hope that tools like these can lead to better cross-cultural understanding and bring us closer together.”

By listening to and collaborating with trans communities, Keck Medicine of USC is creating the preeminent gender-affirming care program on the West Coast.

By Chinyere Amobi

Illustration by Terri Po