We're looking for research mentors for our SEACrowd 2027 Apprentice Program.
Register interest
See our preprint "Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation in Multimodal Vision-Language Model", building Southeast Asia's culturally-aware VLMs
Read arxiv preprint
Compile the first catalog and benchmark for 500+ Southeast Asian datasets
View finished projectOur Vision
We are a grassroots-led community of researchers from Southeast Asia (SEA) advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, resources, and capabilities for the region.
We envision a future where AI ecosystems in SEA are mature and competitive with the rest of the world, wherein people from SEA can use world-class AI in their own linguistic and cultural context.
Our Mission
We commit to a three-pronged approach to reaching our vision:
- spearheading grassroots-led model training and dataset building to improve AI resources for SEA
- creating a community of like-minded researchers via the ACL Special Interest Group SIGSEA
- supporting early-career researchers through the SEACrowd Apprentice Program
Recent News
Our SEACrowd Apprentice Program 2026 passes the mid-term milestone! Five teams with 21 mentees are making strong progress on LLM and multilingual AI research. We’re also seeking mentors for the 2027 batch, and will be opening applications later in 2026.
We kicked off SEA Crowd Apprentice Program 2026 with an exciting orientation session. We will update their progress in the next three months, where our apprentices, under mentorship, push the boundaries of multilingual, multimodal, and efficiency research, with a special focus on Southeast Asian languages.
A new post on the evolution of the Tagalog language and its transition to Filipino is now live! Isaiah Flores explores how a regional language became a national standard, and why this evolution matters for training robust, inclusive NLP models.
Our 2026 apprentice program is closed. Thank you to all applicants! Watch your emails from seacrowd.research@gmail.com for updates on the selection process.
[Finished] Join SEA-VL Phase 2 to help build Southeast Asia’s first culturally-aware vision-language model! Earn 200+ points for certificate + merchandise or 300+ points for co-authorship of our organization paper, through data curation, annotation, prompting, and evaluation tasks.