Special PhD Seminar – Beatrice Savoldi + Christelle Jozet-Alves

Friday 6 February from 10am

Venue: Centre Broca

Special PhD seminar in the frame of the « Girls and Women in Science Day », co-organized by NBA, Bordeaux Neurocampus, the Bordeaux Neurocampus Graduate Program and the Neurocampus Parity and Inclusion Committee (NeuroPIC )

Programme

10:00 – Beatrice Savoldi

Beatrice Savoldi
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
https://bsavoldi.github.io/

Language Technologies, Gender and Society

Abstract: Language technologies have become an integral part of everyday life, mediating how we communicate, work, and access information. Yet, these systems are far from neutral: they reflect and at times amplify social biases and inequalities, including those related to gender. Widely used applications such as machine translation can reproduce stereotypes and struggle to generate feminine and inclusive linguistic forms, raising important questions about their social and cultural impact. With the rapid adoption of large, multilingual, and general-purpose language models, these issues now affect an ever-growing and increasingly diverse population of users and contexts. Drawing on my research and personal reflections, this talk explores the role of gender in natural language processing (NLP), examining how language technologies shape—and are shaped by—societal norms and interactions. I discuss how NLP systems can impact society and how they can, in turn, be leveraged for society.

Biosketch: Beatrice Savoldi is a researcher in the Machine Translation Unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy. Her research lies at the intersection of language, computation, and society within the field of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on the social and ethical implications of language technologies. She has primarily worked on cross-lingual and multilingual tasks, including machine translation for both speech and text, and is deeply interested in understanding how people interact with language technologies in their everyday lives using human-centered approaches. In June 2023, she received her International Ph.D. from the University of Trento and Augsburg, making significant contributions to the study of gender bias and inclusivity in speech and machine translation. She has received multiple recognitions for her research, including the 2024 Trentino Prize for Young Researchers awarded by the Province of Trento for her work on gender-inclusive language technologies, two Social Impact Awards at EMNLP 2024, and an Outstanding Paper Award at COLING 2020. She is also active in the community, serving as an organizer of the Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies (GITT) and Mind the AI-GAP: Co-Designing Socio-Technical Systems (AI-GAP).

10:50 – Coffee break

11:30 – Announcement of the laureate of the Marian Diamond Prize before the PhD seminar

11:30 – Christelle Jozet-Alves

Pr. Christelle Jozet-Alves
Univ. Caen, France

Invited by Florence Pontais (INCIA)

Mental time travels: insights from cephalopod molluscs

Abstract: Mental time travel is considered as the ability to mentally travel backward or forward in time: remembering past events (episodic memory), as well as imagining possible future ones. Episodic memory is defined as the recall of personally experienced events specifically referring to contextual information about what, where and when a particular event occurred. Futur planning is described as the ability of humans to flexibly anticipate their own mental states of need and act now to secure them. Some authors have stated that episodic memory has evolved to serve future planning. However, most hypotheses have been stated by considering results of research in vertebrates. This makes evolutionary hypotheses difficult to test as their complex cognitive abilities may have evolved from common ancestors. Since the complex cognitive abilities of modern cephalopod molluscs (e.g. cuttlefish and octopuses) have arisen independently of the vertebrate lineage, they appeared over the past years as highly promising species to study mental time travels from evolutionary, mechanistic, functional and comparative perspectives.

Biosketch: Christelle Jozet-Alves is a lecturer in Animal Behaviour at the University of Caen in France. After completing a PhD on spatial memory in cuttlefish, she has joined the University of Edinburgh to work on the neural substrates of spatial memory in birds. Since 2009, her research primarily focuses on cephalopods cognitive abilities in the team Cognitive Neuroethology of Cephalopods of the EthoS’ lab (UMR CNRS 6552). She is particularly interested in the Evolution of complex cognitive abilities, such as source and episodic memories. Using a comparative framework, she aims at shed light on how cognitive abilities might be mediated by entirely different neural circuitries in distantly-related species.

Selected publications

Poncet, A. Roig, P. Billard, C. Bellanger, C. Jozet-Alves (2025) Cuttlefish favour their current need to hide rather than their future need for food. Learning and Behavior 53:128-135. DOI: 10.3758/s13420-024-00663-y
L. Poncet, P. Billard, N.S. Clayton, C. Bellanger, C. Jozet-Alves (2024) False-memories in cuttlefish. iScience 27(8):110322. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110322
L. Poncet, C. Desnous, C. Bellanger, C. Jozet-Alves (2022) Unruly octopuses are the rule: Octopus vulgaris use multiple and individually variable strategies in an episodic-like memory task. Journal of Experimental Biology 225(19):jeb244234. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.244234
A.K. Schnell, N.S. Clayton, R.T. Hanlon, C. Jozet-Alves (2021) Episodic-like memory is preserved with age in cuttlefish. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288(1957):20211052. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.1052
P. Billard, N.S. Clayton, C. Jozet-Alves (2020) Cuttlefish retrieve whether they smelt or saw a previously encountered item. Scientific reports 10:5413. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-62335-x
P. Billard, A.K. Schnell, N.S. Clayton, C. Jozet-Alves (2020) Cuttlefish show flexible and future-dependent foraging cognition. Biology Letters 16(2):20190743. DOI: 0.1098/rsbl.2019.0743
C. Jozet-Alves, M. Bertin, N.S. Clayton (2013) Evidence of episodic-like memory in cuttlefish. Current Biology 23:R1033-1035.

12:30 – Lunch with the speakers

Opened to PhD Students and post docs
On registration.

Meet the speakers!

You are a research staff ? Write to Julia Goncalves who will organize the schedule.

You are a PhD student? You can register to share some pizza after the talks. Registrations are open.

Publication: 29/01/26
Mise à jour: 29/01/26