Thread by @kchonyc

i'm quite embarrassed and wanted to sweep it under a rug, but let me share what happened behind this, largely for my own record/reminder and for a small hope this might raise awareness.

1st&foremost, it was totally my oversight to miss that the keynote speaker lineup was entirely composed of male speakers, including myself, which would've reinforced the lack of diversity and also potentially sent out a wrong sign to many participants and others, in our fields.

i've been calling out similar cases myself earlier pretty both publicly & privately (see e.g. slide 80 in drive.google.com/drive/u/0/fold…), but i've apparently fallen into the trap of seeing others' faults while failing to see my own. how embarrassing and eye-opening!

when @tarfandy called it out , i realized but then hesitated for a moment: what should i do? should i do anything? after all, i accepted the invitation w/o knowing the lineup. if i stay silent, wouldn't it just go away and only a few (if any) remembers?

you know.. producing an infinite series of possible excuses in my head. but, as they say, better late than never. i decided to see if i could somewhat alleviate this issue, while expecting the worst: offending organizers, alternative speakers &/or perhaps even participants.

thankfully, @hhexiy kindly understood the situation & my intention and agreed to replace me. i'm super excited to hear from her how to "Unlearn dataset bias for robust language understanding" super exciting! i highly recommend everyone to attend and listen to her talk.

the organizers @sedak99 were very open to this last-minute suggestion. i'm thankful they decided to take this extra step in the last minute. the workshop looks fantastic, and i'm looking forward to attending it next week: vectorinstitute.ai/event/natural-…

of course, i must thank @tarfandy for calling it out. this was a great opportunity for me to look at myself rather than at others.