iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

The phenomenon of "I can't not do this"... until "I can't do this" underpins so much of this work. #FaceInterface

SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Audience comment: Look at the foundations you're building it on. With software, realized it wasn't a stable foundation and had to rewrite a lot of code. A tool nearly collapsed because of MacOS updates, took multiple people 18 months to fix, nearly crippled a whole corner of the ecosystem.

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Audience comment: so many projects are passions and hobbies, 80%+ donated time. Started thinking about business models and revenue streams from day 1, instead of making it and open-sourcing it and realizing I couldn't maintain it any longer. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

@tsmullaney.bsky.social Little taxes here and there (SFO landing fees, ICANN fees) enable people to get things done. This is how ICANN can run weeklong workshops to sort out non-Latin script domains, or curated exhibits at SFO airport. No one's going to argue about .99 surcharge on a plane ticket.

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Marc Weber: the question of freezing language in amber -- the ship sailed with writing. If you don't update to the current changes in writing, you're doing harm. It's a much more weighty decision to orphan the languages. Necessary but not sufficient to encode languages. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Hrant Papazian: "Preservation is for museums. Young people don't like to go to museums because they don't have a past. Young people want to make a future, and the future is the only way out. We have to build the future and get tools for the future. Young women matter more for Nüshu." #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

@tsmullaney.bsky.social "Open source" is the great-great-grandchild of this romantic idea, there are communities that don't buy it. How does one confront this conflict between "shared heritage" and linguistic/cultural ownership. "Uni-" has a history, are we structurally repeating? #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

@tsmullaney.bsky.social Notion of shared human heritage is a free market concept, an open sound-stage of existence. Romantic vision of a shared destiny, beauty, etc. But when that vision was literally guiding principle of marching gunboats to remove an obstacle... 👀 #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Kamal Mansour: "What we're speaking about here is enabling digital writing, which is not the same as language. By representing the writing of particular languages in Unicode, enable them to create digital patrimony if they choose. It doesn't mean that's all they create." #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Audience comment: "I'm constantly running into how Unicode screws up my world. It doesn't take into consideration the full things necessary for the expression of the language. Nothing about the rules of typography and representation in layout. When fonts disagree you have chaos." #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Holding up Unicode inclusion or digitization as the ultimate goal... is that too simplistic? What's the goal we're trying to achieve?

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Peter Constable: "We should be enablers of local choice. And yes, that means that some languages will die. Make sure local communities know they have choices, choices are there, and we're there to support when they choose a path where we can help." #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Discussion question: Are we preserving language or enabling communication? Are we creating a Tower of Babel? Are we ossifying language through the unchanging nature of Unicode? #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

@tsmullaney.bsky.social "Do you want to see the world saved, or do you want to be the one who saved the world?" In a structural way, this leads to the fragmentation and silo-ization. Ego plays a part. What organization says 'let's merge, and I'll take your name'?" #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

@tsmullaney.bsky.social wrapping up #FaceInterface. This is the third iteration of the conference: urge to create "compostable" organizations, whose work can obviate the need for it to exist. Can get drunk on the legacy of it, never really want to fully solve the problem, want people to come back.

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Reposted by SILICON @Stanford

Letterform Archive @letterformarchive.org · 19/01/2025

Related to LoCoS is a preceding and influential pictographic writing system, Blissymbolics: letterformarchive.org/news/blissym... #FaceInterface

letterformarchive.org

From the Collection: Blissymbolics

If the “Father of Semantography” had his way with written language, we’d all be #blissed.

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Reposted by SILICON @Stanford

Bridge Chase @bchasemadethis.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

“Linguistic diversity is not just a technical challenge to be solved; it is a cultural treasure to be cherished” — Dr. Tawfik Jelassi, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information #FaceInterface #langsky

Image from the Face / Interface conference of Dr. Tawfik Jelassi, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information

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Reposted by SILICON @Stanford

Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 19/01/2025

@tsmullaney.bsky.social at #FaceInterface "Privilege is the ability to move onto cooler problems", in the context of digitally-disadvantaged languages. For English we can worry about VR/AR, color fonts, etc. Most languages still need basic OCR/HTR/NLP. #MultilingualDH

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Reposted by SILICON @Stanford

Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 19/01/2025

Eason Lu passed around a souvenir example of Nüshu script / 3rd day letter (with some embroidery on the cover! #DHmakes #FaceInterface #MultilingualDH

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Sina Ahmadi closes out the #FaceInterface slides the best way: "these are some dolma my wife and I made."

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Sina Ahmadi: Goal is to create a machine translation system. Limited amount of data, so fine-tuning existing models. Meta's No Language Left Behind model covers 200 languages. Super-low BLEU score for these languages with NLLB, fine-tuning had big improvements. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Sina Ahmadi: Hawrami had almost 10 people contributing. 46 hours of speech data collected using DOLMA speech bot. Used same multilingual corpus, asked people to select language and read sentences. 28k utterances! #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Sina Ahmadi: Gave volunteers a set of sentences in a highly resourced language they know and in English. Community-driven multilingual parallel corpus, > 50,000 sentences total. Previously some of the languages only had 100 sentences online. All sentences aligned with English. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Sina Ahmadi: Some skepticism, "adding fuel to cultural hegemony of Turkish language". (Someone on Reddit was mad because of dolma reference.) Dolma is a food, but thought it'd be a good name because it'd be outside of politics. It's an acronym! Nothing to do with Turkish! #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Sina Ahmadi: Vision was community building, data collection, NLP development, scientific dissemination, sustainability & impact -- in that order. Intensive outreach campaign last fall, publishers, language experts, academics, native speakers. 30 highly active volunteers. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Last but not least, SILICON Practitioner Sina Ahmadi on "Dolma-NLP: Developing Language Technologies for Middle Eastern Languages". Middle East is a linguistically complex place, rich diversity of languages. Only a few are officially recognized. Goal is sustainable lang tech community #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: As Ota said at the end of his book, the work cannot be done alone, and it's up to us to continue.

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Reposted by SILICON @Stanford

Typographica @typographica.org · 19/01/2025

One thing that makes @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social’s #FaceInterface a unique conference: despite hailing from many different disciplines (engineering, design, linguistics), almost everyone here knows by heart the difference between “character” & “glyph”. (Okay, maybe also the Unicode Conference.)

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Next week, symbol maker will be available. Database will be available, open-source, no gatekeeping here. Website is just the starting point; Ota's goals 15 years ago are still valid now. Wanted Ota to see that people are still interested. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Tutorial is available in English and French, dictionary available in English, French, Japanese. New keyboard available at beginning of the year, also planning to write articles on the history of LoCoS. Got to access his personal archives. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Accessibility is key if you want people to use a language. Also wanted people to make LoCoS. Drew all symbols in Adobe Illustrator but not everyone has access to this tool. Have to refine them anyway, built a new tool for drawing new shapes. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Working on a word processor to play with LoCoS. Easy to write with a pen, but harder on the computer. Creating a simple interface for text creation. Current virtual keyboard is inefficient; thinking about compact layout keyboard with complex key combination. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Can do possibility, advice, verb tenses with simple combination. More than 800 symbols and combinations to discover. Platform for learning how to use it online. Includes a dictionary with composition of characters. #FaceInterface

lovers-communication-system.com

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: 18 basic shapes and dots. Shapes are important for pronunciation. Each shape symbol related to an emotion. Each open circle is a person. Orientation is a person. Dot means existence: dot inside means me, outside is someone else. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: 2 years ago, tried to make LoCoS accessible again. Vectorized every symbol as accurately as possible, make pixel-perfect on grid. Ota said "Your project is great but your grid is wrong!!" Ota sent documentation to explain. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Yukio Ota published ebook in 2012 LoCoS: Visual Sign Language for Global Communication. Continued doing blog and lectures into 2020s. Only source on LoCoS is an ebook in Japanese and English on Kindle. Ota designed a keyboard, project created a website for LoCoS. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: 1987 Japanese Exit Sign adopted as an international standard by ISO (competing with a Soviet proposal). Worked on visualization of global interdependence, using no words just glyphs. Pictogram Design book published in 1987. Many other design awards. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: Yukio Ota studied at Tama Art University, traveled around Italy when in 1964 at Venice Academy of Fine Arts. 1964 Tokyo Olympics used pictograms for international communication. Taught at Tokyo Zokei University. 1971 presented LoCoS at UNESCO. Published in 1973. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Loïc Marleix: "The rediscovery of the Lovers Communication System". LoCoS is a conlang, international auxiliary language with words, verbs, grammar. "As easy as lovers are understanding each other". Pictoral system. Both meaning and sound. Designed by Yukio Ota. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: More realistic perspective on ISCII these days: "If you're having to put in lots of joiners and non-joiners, it's more trouble than it's worth." #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Technical advocates found practical issues with Unicode encoding; cultural advocates felt Unicode and ISCII were an imperialist force that needed to be resisted. ISCII imperialism: niche technical issues, antagonisms of regional language politics, a Unicode mentality. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Unicode wouldn't relent; Tamil community was right it'd be more efficient to encode their script separately but would go against Unicode's principles. Entirely new redundant block couldn't be reasonably added, but added appeasement band-aids including mappings. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Tamil was building own keyboards, encoding standards, etc. since 2010. Approached Unicode in mid-2000's with their design for Tamil which they'd tested, wanted to be pulled out of ISCII model, given own code block. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Dealing with conjuncts is what gives Indic scripts designation of "complex script", visual form of character varies by context (also get this for Arabic). Tamil felt unfairly grouped in this category. 247 clear characters. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: 6 years later, found that no one was using the new codepoints. For Malayalam speakers, they were fine with ISCII. Other language groups were less happy with being compared to Devanagari. For Tamil (Dravidian language), entire coding design for the script was at stake. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Users were inconvenienced, texts were glitchy, which invoked issues of the language politics in India. Slights against people's language, and it was crucial to fix it in order to preserve languages for the digital age. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: In lining up characters with Devanagari for ISCII, scripts' indiosyncracies got left out. Even though ISCII eventually sorted this out, they never got into Unicode. ISCII developers use phonetic model; Unicode is graphemic. Zero-width joiners, viramas, etc. are hacks. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Increasingly furious and frustrated emails. Unicode at first offered a code sequence recipe on its FAQ page. Situation got messier when an Indian developer equated Bangla forms with half-forms in Devanagari. Finally experts articulated semantic distinctiveness. #FaceInterface

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SILICON @Stanford @stanfordsilicon.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Anushah Hossain: Bangla "Khanda Ta" character, essentially a silenced ta. Bangla user community started writing to Unicode asking where it was. To Unicode, it seemed to be just a graphical variant, but for users it'd become a distinct letter in the Bangla script. #FaceInterface

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