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
Four papers from SEACrowd Apprentice Program 2026 are accepted! SEATauBench at EMNLP Findings 2026, SEA-CLIP-Tiny at ACCV 2026, and two papers from Adaptive Memory at the COLM 2026 Workshop on Context Beyond the Window. Congratulations to all mentees and mentors!
We’re planning for Apprentice Program 2027.
Our SEACrowd Apprentice Program 2026 wraps up with the final milestone where five teams gave six presentations. 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, welcoming 11 mentors and 20 mentees working on five projects in multilingual, multicultural, multimodal AI, and efficiency.
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.