Ulla Petti
Ulla Petti
Research Associate in AI, Ethics, and Language at the University of Cambridge
Program Manager for the Early Career Community at the Centre for Human-Inspired AI
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I’m a Research Associate in AI, Ethics, and Language currently working at the EQUATE project focussing on developing equitable NLP at Cambridge Language Technology Lab.
With a background in linguistics and language impairments, my work has mostly focussed on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and on the tools that assess cognitive decline related language changes. I am especially interested in the impact of these tools to the individuals with lived experience of conditions such as dementia, and to the wider society, and my work focuses on the responsible collaborative NLP development and engaging patient and clinician populations.
I completed my PhD in Computation, Cognition and Language at Cambridge Language Technology Lab (LTL) under the supervision of Professor Anna Korhonen and Dr Simon Baker. My thesis focussed on the automatic detection of early signs of Alzheimer’s disease from speech. I hold a master’s degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Linguistics from King’s College London.
Publications
Publications
Petti, U., & Korhonen, A. (2024, May). LoSST-AD: A Longitudinal Corpus for Tracking Alzheimer’s Disease Related Changes in Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (pp. 10813-10821).
Petti, U., Baker, S., Korhonen, A., & Robin, J. (2023). How Much Speech Data Is Needed for Tracking Language Change in Alzheimer’s Disease? A Comparison of Random Length, 5-Min, and 1-Min Spontaneous Speech Samples. Digital Biomarkers, 7(1), 157-166.
Petti, U., Nyrup, R., Skopek, J. M., & Korhonen, A. (2023, June). Ethical considerations in the early detection of Alzheimer's disease using speech and AI. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 1062-1075).
Petti, U., Baker, S., Korhonen, A., & Robin, J. (2023). The generalizability of longitudinal changes in speech before Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 92(2), 547-564.
Petti, U., Baker, S., & Korhonen, A. (2020). A systematic literature review of automatic Alzheimer’s disease detection from speech and language. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(11), 1784-1797.
Vulić, I., Baker, S., Ponti, E. M., Petti, U., Leviant, I., Wing, K., ... & Korhonen, A. (2020). Multi-simlex: A large-scale evaluation of multilingual and crosslingual lexical semantic similarity. Computational Linguistics, 46(4), 847-897.
CV
CV
Current roles
Current roles
Research Associate in AI, Ethics, and Language at the University of Cambridge
Programme Manager for the Early Career Community at the Centre for Human-Inspired AI
Education
Education
2024 PhD in Computation, Cognition and Language. University of Cambridge, Trinity College
2019 MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (Distinction). University of Cambridge, Trinity College
2018 BA in English Language and Linguistics (First Class Honours). King’s College London
TEACHING
TEACHING
2024 Conducting admission interviews for BA in Linguistics. Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge
2024 Marking final year undergraduate exams in Computational Linguistics. University of Cambridge
2023 Supervising undergraduate thesis
2020-2024 Supervising undergraduate course Computational Linguistics. University of Cambridge
2019-2021 Supervising undergraduate course Sounds and Words. University of Cambridge
2020-2021 Leading a preparation course for National Linguistics Olympiad. Hugo Treffner Gymnasium
2015-present Access and Outreach projects. Various high schools in the UK and Estonia
Other activities and roles
Other activities and roles
2024 Co-organiser of CHIA Conference "AI for Good"
2024 Scientific Programme Committee @ RaPID-5 LREC-Coling 2024
2023-present Co-founder of the Centre for Human-Inspired AI (CHIA) Early Career Community (ECC)
2023-present Co-chair of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) Methodological Special Interest Group (MSIG) "Untold Stories: Navigating Interdisciplinarity in Health Research" (Panels chaired: Navigating the Ethics of Technology in Health Research; Navigating the Challenges of Meaningful Patient and Public Involvement)
2022-2023 W1 Captain at Cambridge University Real Tennis Club (CURTC)
2019-2021 Women's Officer at Trinity College BA Committee (Graduate Student Union), Social Officer at Language Technology Lab
2016-2018 Head Coach at Chelsea Tennis School
internships
internships
2021 Research intern at Winterlight Labs, Toronto, Canada. Project: Tracking longitudinal change in speech in Alzheimer's disease
2019 Research intern at the University of Cambridge Language Technology Lab. Project: Multisimlex
2018 Research intern at King’s College London Language and Cognition Lab. Project: Eye-tracking experiment
2016 Research intern at Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Tartu. Project: Expanding Estonian WordNet
FUNDS and awards
FUNDS and awards
2022, 2020, 2019, 2018 Estonian Culture Stipend
2020 Luminor Bank Scholarship
2019-2022 UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Funding for a PhD Project on Automatic Alzheimer's Disease detection
2018 King's English Language and Linguistics Award (for graduating top of the course), Ambassador Riivo Sinijärv Award, Estonian Students' Fund in US (ESFUSA) Award, Harald Raudsepp Award, Estonian Culture Capital Fund
2016 Estonian Students' Fund in the US (ESFUSA) Award
2015 Young Scholar's Grant
Recent talks and presentations
Recent talks and presentations
May 2024 "LoSST-AD: A Longitudinal Corpus for Tracking Alzheimer’s Disease Related Changes in Spontaneous Speech" LREC-Coling 2024 Torino, Italy
June 2023 "Ethical considerations in the early detection of Alzheimer's disease using speech and AI" FAccT 2023 Chicago, US
April 2023 "Speech-based Alzheimer's disease detection. Why? How? For whom?" Estonian Applied Linguistics Association Spring Conference 2023, Tallinn, Estonia. Link (in Estonian)
July 2021 "Phonetics and phonology, and what they can tell us about the speaker's health" International Linguistics Olympiad Preparation Camp, University of Tartu
March 2021 "Tracking longitudinal change in speech in Alzheimer's disease" CamPAL (Cambridge Processing and Acquisition of Language)
September 2020 "Detecting signs of Alzheimer's disease in speech and language" TÜLing (Tartu University Linguistics Seminar)
rEviews
rEviews
Alzheimer's Research & Therapy
Applied Acoustics
Health Informatics Journal
Contact
Contact
ump20 AT cam.ac.uk
Language Technology Lab
Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
Faculty of English Building
9 West Road
Cambridge CB3 9DB, UK
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