Elhuyar, IKERLAN and MasOrange join the UPV/EHU Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology
Recently, the Elhuyar Foundation, the IKERLAN technology center and the company MasOrange have joined the Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology of the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea.
Recently, the Elhuyar Foundation, the IKERLAN technology center and the company MasOrange have joined the Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology of the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea.
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“The Chair allows IKERLAN to transmit to society our technological knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and we can continue to strengthen our research work in favor of the applied AA,” said Josu Bilbao, director of Digital Technologies and AA of IKERLAN. In the words of Aitzol Astigarraga Pagoaga, coordinator of the NLP Orai center, “for Elhuyar it is very important to be part of the chair through its artificial intelligence center, Orai NLP, to continue researching about language technologies and adapting solutions to the needs of the market”. MasOrange’s Director of Talent, Elisa Perán, stressed that “the Chair provides us with an ideal framework to work directly with the students and thus apply AA and language technologies to real problems.”
We are a nonprofit private entity. We were born in 1972 with the intention of uniting science and Euskera. The first steps were made as a cultural association and in 2002 we became a foundation. In addition to the Foundation, the Elhuyar group consists of the companies Zubize SLU and Eleka Ingeniaritza Linguistikoa SL.
The Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Linguistic Technology of the UPV/EHU is part of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (ENIA), which in turn is part of the Spain Digital 2026 agenda. The HiTZ Chair was selected by the Ministry for Digital Transformation in the call for the financing of university chairs dedicated to research, dissemination, teaching and innovation in Artificial Intelligence. Of the 21 chairs selected by the Ministry, it is the only one dedicated to linguistic technology and the only one to be developed in the Basque Country. The Chair includes researchers from four working groups on AI from the Faculty of Informatics of the UPV/EHU (including the Basque Language Technology Centre HiTZ) and the company Avature, a pioneer in the field of technology acquisition and talent management. In addition, the chair aims to promote public-private cooperation in the field of AI applied to linguistic technology.
“One of the essential characteristics of intelligence is the ability to communicate through natural language. Linguistic technology is a field of Artificial Intelligence that develops, above all, algorithms and systems that can understand and interpret human language. This field is generating a revolution within AI with applications that are changing society: machine translation, voice dialogue systems or creative systems like ChatGPT or Gemini. The Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Linguistic Technology HiTZ has an ambitious program to strengthen the leadership of the University of the Basque Country in this technology, increase the capacities of the associated companies in the field of AI and position the country in the technological vanguard”, stressed Aitor Soroa, director of the chair.
