Natasha Ceol (’28)

This summer I interned at the World Bank in the Development Data Partnership (DDP), supervised by Holly Krambeck. The DDP is a team at the World Bank that builds data products and brokers data-sharing agreements between public institutions and governments and private companies. The partnership has both data partners and development partners. Data partners are organizations that provide data and/or services, including Anthropic, GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, OpenAI, and Waze. Development partners are international organizations that receive data and/or services, including the IMF, UNICEF, OECD, UNDP, and regional development banks.

The partnership develops data products and conducts research that supports both its development and data partners. This summer I specifically worked on building a Low-Resource Language Index. A low-resource language is a language for which there is limited high-quality data available for training AI models. I started the project with the goal of creating an index that would map, for every language in the world, how much high-quality text and audio data is available for AI training. By combining this information with population and economic indicator data, the final index could help identify which languages are most low-resourced, as well as populations that are particularly underserved by AI because they speak languages with limited training data despite having large numbers of speakers. This could provide insight into where investment should be directed, whether toward model development, data creation, digital infrastructure, or other areas.

This summer and this project allowed me to explore my interest in AI through a development lens, which I hadn’t done before. I was able to take ownership of a project from the beginning, consult with experts in the low-resource language field, and apply the technical skills I’ve gained at MIT to a development-focused problem. I also had the opportunity to help run the DDP’s annual global conference, where members of the team and representatives from partner organizations came together to share their work and discuss their projects. More broadly, the internship encouraged my interest in AI policy, economic policy, and a potential career in economics.