The SEACrowd Apprentice Program is 3–4 month guided research journey where you’ll collaborate with mentors, build multilingual AI tools.

Open to anyone with Southeast Asia affiliation or research focus—no strict age or credential limits. We’re looking for potential, motivation, and curiosity.

Let’s build a VLM that sees and celebrates Southeast Asia—together. 💪

@josephimperial.bsky.social @samuel-cahyawijaya.bsky.social @jcblaise.bsky.social @ruochenzhang.bsky.social @rianadamr.bsky.social @antonrufino.bsky.social

Whether you’re a researcher, developer, artist, linguist, photographer, student, or simply someone who loves Southeast Asia, your voice and skills matter. Join us!

📥 Apply now: seacrowd.github.io//seavl-phase...

💬 Questions? Join the conversation on Discord: discord.gg/XXRHFuvkTA

Why contribute?
🤝 Work with an international team of passionate researchers
🏅 Earn points for every contribution—with opportunities for a certificate, exclusive merch (t-shirt & keychain), and even co-authorship on our final paper

We are looking for contributors who can:
🔹Submit culturally relevant images from SEA
🔹Annotate image submissions
🔹Translate existing benchmarks to SEA languages
🔹Create high-quality questions for multicultural images from SEA
🔹Create high-quality prompts for image generation with our VLM

We want build the first open-source vision-language model (VLM) that fully captures Southeast Asia’s rich cultures, languages, and everyday life!

Interested in pushing research for Southeast Asian languages? We're happy to welcome you in SEACrowd and SIGSEA! See links below:

SIGSEA: www.sigsea.org/home
Discord: discord.gg/XXRHFuvkTA

Introducing SEA-VL with 1.3M culturally relevant images—50x larger than existing datasets!
🔍 Key insights:
✅ Crowdsourcing: good accuracy but slow & costly
✅ Image Crawling: ~85% cultural relevance
❌ Image Generation fails to capture SEA nuances & faces licensing issues

Why is this important?
✅ AI models trained on culturally relevant data can better understand local contexts, traditions, and languages.
✅ Community contributions ensure AI does not misrepresent local identities.
✅ We empower local communities in AI development.

💡 That’s why we created SEA-VL, an open-source initiative designed to bridge the resource gap and provide AI models with more accurate, culturally relevant data from SEA. But we couldn’t have done it alone!

#NoLanguageLeftBehind #SoutheastAsia

AI is shaping the future, but how often does it reflect the cultures, languages, and traditions of Southeast Asia? Not enough!

Most VL datasets used to train AI are dominated by Western-centric data, leaving Southeast Asian cultures largely underrepresented.