Researcher from the CBiR Linguistic Engineering Team wins the FameLab competition!
MSc Tomas Senda, an NLP specialist from the Linguistic Engineering Team, took part in the FameLab competition last Tuesday, where he had just three minutes to prove that science can be explained in a simple, engaging, and passionate way.
FameLab is the largest science communication competition in the world. It was founded in 2005 in Cheltenham, UK, as part of a local science festival, but it quickly gained popularity worldwide. Local editions of the competition have been held in over 30 countries across all continents, with more than 40,000 participants taking the stage.
This year’s edition was organized by the University of Silesia in cooperation with the Academic Consortium – Katowice City of Science. Twelve finalists from across Poland took part in the competition.
Below are a few words from Tomas:
“In the FameLab competition, I had three minutes to talk about science to a broad audience while following the “3C” rule: content, clarity, charisma. I chose a topic that is part of my everyday work — what we actually lose when we place the Polish language into the machinery of global AI models.
The problem is not abstract. Languages do not exist in a vacuum, and when processed by large language models, they can fall victim to what translation studies calls “lost in translation.” I mean that untranslatable “remainder” that constitutes the essence of a language — history, irony, collective memory, and entire layers of meaning. For Polish, this implies a real risk of simplification or even erasure of what makes it most interesting.
Building language models is one of the key dimensions of digital sovereignty. It is not only about infrastructure or data, but about whether AI can truly understand rather than merely translate.
On the FameLab stage, I was surrounded by physicists, engineers, biologists, and chemists — people conducting ambitious and groundbreaking research in various fields of science. Conversations with them reinforced my belief that such meetings are extremely valuable: discussions, questions, and ideas confronted with perspectives from outside one’s own bubble. I hope that my contribution — a reminder that behind every model there is a language, and behind every language there is a human being — reached the right audience.”
We invite you to watch Tomas’s presentation on the University of Silesia’s YouTube channel.