BasisTech was the major sponsor of the first day of the inaugural Cambridge-Somerville Asian Festival, held on May 20, 2022 at its Somerville, MA headquarters. Honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the festival centered around a live mural demonstration by Somerville-based Nepali street artist/muralist Sneha Shrestha (imagine876.com), and Massachusetts-based TaiwaneseAmerican activist and comics illustrator Shaina Lu (shainadoesart.com), who led a zine-making workshop for adults and children.

“Our company’s roots are in enabling software for Asian languages, so we were thrilled to have the opportunity to support the local Asian-American community and also make a space that celebrates modern Asian art year-round,” said Carl Hoffman, CEO of BasisTech. “It’s serendipity that the Nepali characters in Ms. Shrestha’s art echoes the multilingual text analytics that is our core business, and expresses beautifully our company ethos of valuing diversity.”

Located at the entrance to BasisTech, the two-panel mural features the third article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Nepali: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of person.”

“It takes a village to put on a festival that is 100% volunteer-run,” said Nina Farouk, lead festival organizer. “It’s not an overstatement that this mural and the first day of the festival would not have been possible without tremendous support from BasisTech. We hope other companies follow their lead and step forward to uplift the Asian-American community.”

About the Cambridge-Somerville Asian Festival
The Cambridge-Somerville Asian Festival was held on May 20-2. Its aims are to highlight the diversity of heritages within the Asian American community, and provide a positive anti-racist vision through exposure to Asian arts, music, food, and community leaders.This event is an opportunity to bring communities together to celebrate cultures and ethnicities and counter anti-Asian American sentiment in a positive way. The festival was organized by the Cambridge Families of Asian Descent (CFAD), Pan Asian Club (PAC) at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Asian Educators Resource Groups (Asian ERG), and Somerville Asian and Asian American Family Network (SAAAFN). Learn more at bit.ly/2022-csaf.

About BasisTech

Data analytics and machine learning are critical to verifying identity, understanding customers, anticipating world events, and uncovering crime. BasisTech provides businesses and governments with advanced analytics and AI-powered solutions for deriving insights from multilingual text, connecting data silos, and discovering digital evidence. Our Rosette text analytics platform employs classical machine learning and deep neural nets to extract meaningful information from unstructured data. Autopsy, our digital forensics platform, and Cyber Triage, our incident response tool, serve the needs of law enforcement, national security, and legal technologists. KonaSearch delivers deep search across Salesforce and other data sources.

Company headquarters are in Somerville, Mass., with offices in Washington, D.C., London, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. For more information, visit basistech.com.