EACL 2023 conference welcomes representatives of sanctioned Russian companies

In early May 2023, the Association of Computational Linguistics will host EACL 2023, the 17th Conference of its European Chapter, which has considerable weight in the academic world. Despite many US and EU representatives in governing bodies of the organization, the conference has asked to participate sanctioned Russian individuals, Denis Dovgopoliy, co-founder and CEO at Ukrainian company Unicorn Nest, shared on his LinkedIn page.

• The conference is sponsored by internationally recognized companies like Grammarly, Liveperson, Amazon Science, Bloomberg, Duolingo, Adobe, and Babelscape. These companies represent the countries which previously imposed sanctions against the education system of state that invaded Ukraine.
• The list of participants and even workshop organizers includes not just Russians, but individuals affiliated with sanctioned companies such as:
  • Sber/AIRI, the largest state-owned bank (Tatiana Shavrina, Vladislav Mikhailov, Oleg Serikov, Vitaly Protasov, Ekaterina Voloshina).
  • Kaspersky, which is an instrument of Russian intelligence agencies (Katerina Vylomova).
  • Skolkovo, a leading science cluster of the Putin regime (Alexander Panchenko, Varvara Logacheva).
• After the correspondence with the organizers, they confirmed the participation of sanctioned individuals, supporting their access to the global scientific community and the development of technologies.
• The same technologies can now be actively used for military and police use in Russia, a state recognized by many countries as a terrorist, in its goal to conduct genocide and terror against Ukrainian civilians.

Why does it matter?

By allowing the sanctioned companies to participated in such events, ACL increases their reach and attractiveness, which will help them come up with more solutions, hire more employees, and make more bloody money off of killing innocents.