About me

Computer Science and Engineering (CSEN) Tenure Track Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University (SCU). Director of the AIM Research Lab.

2022 Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan, LIT Lab, advised by Rada Mihalcea.

My research is at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, with current focus on AI for social good and AI for all, towards ensuring inclusive representations in language-vision models and datasets.

Co-host at ACL Mentorship, global panel sessions with AI research experts from academia and industry. Open to everyone, especially the underrepresented!

Current Work: Assistant Professor, Santa Clara University
Education: PhD Computer Science, University of Michigan
Location: Santa Clara, CA, USA
Contact: oignat@scu.edu
Hometown: Botoșani, Romania

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Latest News

July 2025:

Won the Best Resource Paper Award at The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025) for the paper BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition. Check it out!

July 2025:

Won the Best Task Award at The 19th Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (Semeval-2025) at ACL 2025 for the paper SemEval-2025 task 11: Bridging the gap in text-based emotion detection. Check it out!

July 2025:

Co-organizing the NLP for Positive Impact Workshop (NLP4PI) at The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025). Submit your papers!

July 2025:

Co-host for the monthly ACL Mentorship, moderating the AI global mentoring session on Practical guide of how to start coding with transformer models and build your first research project. Check out the recordings!

April 2025:

Won the Best Paper Award at Third Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP) at NAACL 2025 for the paper Detecting Inspiring content on Social Media across Cultures. Check it out!

Work Experience

Academia
Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Santa Clara University
September 2024 - Present
Postdoctoral researcher - University of Michigan
February 2023 - August 2024
Mentor for Master and Ph.D. students, Co-PI Global Health Equity Grant, co-organizer of ACL Year Round Mentorship and many other events and workshops centered on improving diversity in CS.
Graduate Research Assistant - University of Michigan
2017 - 2022
Volunteer for AI4ALL, I introduced high school students to AI by teaching them how to implement and present an NLP project related to social good.
Primary Instructor - University of Michigan
Fall 2021
Primary Instructor for Dicover CS (EECS 198), a class primarily designed for underrepresented minorities in CS
Engineering Teaching Consultant - University of Michigan
2020 - 2021
As a Teaching Consultant, I helped other GSIs/IAs to improve their teaching through one on-one consultations where we discuss challenges they face during teaching, collected feedback from students of the GSIs/IAs and discussed it with the student instructor.
Graduate Student Instructor - University of Michigan
2019 - 2020
GSI for Data Structures and Algorithms (EECS 281) and Data Mining (EECS 476)

Industry
Research Intern - Amazon Prime Video
September 2022 - December 2022
Mentored by Jingru Yi and Burak Uzkent, I implemented and presented research on image-phrase grounding using contrastive learning and image augmentation.
Research Intern - Facebook FAIR
May 2021 - August 2021
Mentored by Paco Guzman, Vishrav Chaudhary and Jean Maillard, I implemented and presented research on OCR impact in Machine Translation for low resource languages.
Research Intern - Facebook FAIAR
May 2020 - August 2020
Mentored by Alon Halevy, Jane Yu and Y-Lan Boureau, I implemented and presented research on Identifying and Analyzing Inspiration in social media data.
Image Processing Developer - Telenav
August 2016 - August 2017
Research and implement efficient automatic ML models for road detection using raw images from mobile phones.
Image Processing Intern - Robert Bosch
July 2015 - August 2016
My undergraduate thesis was done as part of the internship and was about implementing a real-time road recognition algorithm having as input a disparity (depth) image taken from a stereo camera.

Selected Publications (Paper, Poster & Code)

AI for All

Why AI Is WEIRD and Shouldn't Be This Way: Towards AI for Everyone, with Everyone, by Everyone

Rada Mihalcea*, Oana Ignat*, Longju Bai, {...}
AAAI 2025

NLP for Social Good: A survey of challenges, opportunities, and responsible deployment

Antonia Karamolegkou, {...}, Oana Ignat, {...}
Under Review

Brighter: Bridging the gap in human-annotated textual emotion recognition datasets for 28 languages

Shamsudden H Muhammad, {...}, Oana Ignat, {...}
ACL 2025
🏆 Best Resource Paper Award

A PhD Student's Perspective on Research in NLP in the Era of Very Large Language Models

Oana Ignat*, Zhijing Jin*, {...}, Rada Mihalcea
COLING 2024

Inspiration Detection

Cross-cultural Inspiration Detection and Analysis in Real and LLM-generated Social Media Data

Oana Ignat*, Gayathri Ganesh Lakshmy*, Rada Mihalcea
C3NLP at NAACL 2025
🏆 Best Paper Award

Detecting Inspiring Content on Social Media

Oana Ignat, Y-Lan Boureau, Jane A. Yu, Alon Halevy
ACII 2021

Inclusive Language-Vision Models & Datasets

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

David Romero, Chenyang Lyu, {...} Joan Nwatu, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea, Thamar Solorio, Alham Fikri Aji
NeurIPS 2025

Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Vision-Language Models

Joan Nwatu, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea
NAACL 2025

Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vision-Language Models

Joan Nwatu*, Oana Ignat*, Rada Mihalcea
EMNLP 2023

Annotations on a Budget: Leveraging Geo-Data Similarity to Balance Model Performance and Annotation Cost

Oana Ignat, Longju Bai, Joan Nwatu, Rada Mihalcea
COLING 2024

MAiDE-up: Multilingual Deception Detection of GPT-generated Hotel Reviews

Oana Ignat, Xiaomeng Xu, Rada Mihalcea
NAACL 2025

OCR Improves Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

Oana Ignat, Jean Maillard, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzmán
Findings ACL 2022

Language-Vision Understanding

Scalable Performance Analysis for Vision-Language Models

Santiago Castro*, Oana Ignat*, Rada Mihalcea
*SEM 2023

Fill-in-the-Blank: A Challenging Video Understanding Evaluation Framework

Santiago Castro, Ruoyao Wang, Pingxuan Huang, Ian Stewart, Oana Ignat, Nan Liu, Jonathan C. Stroud, Rada Mihalcea
ACL 2022

When did it happen? Duration-informed Temporal Localization of Narrated Actions in Vlogs

Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Yuhang Zhou, Jiajun Bao, Dandan Shan, Rada Mihalcea
TOMM 2022

WhyAct: Identifying Action Reasons in Lifestyle Vlogs

Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Hanwen Miao, Weiji Li, Rada Mihalcea
EMNLP 2021

Identifying Visible actions in Lifestyle Vlogs

Oana Ignat, Laura Burdick, Jia Deng, Rada Mihalcea
ACL 2019

Autonomous Driving

Disparity image segmentation for free-space detection

Oana Ignat, Cosmin Lazar
ICCP 2016

About me

Latest News

Work Experience

Academia

Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Santa Clara University

Postdoctoral researcher - University of Michigan

Graduate Research Assistant - University of Michigan

Primary Instructor - University of Michigan

Engineering Teaching Consultant - University of Michigan

Graduate Student Instructor - University of Michigan

Industry

Research Intern - Amazon Prime Video

Research Intern - Facebook FAIR

Research Intern - Facebook FAIAR

Image Processing Developer - Telenav

Image Processing Intern - Robert Bosch

Selected Publications (Paper, Poster & Code)

AI for All

Why AI Is WEIRD and Shouldn't Be This Way: Towards AI for Everyone, with Everyone, by Everyone

NLP for Social Good: A survey of challenges, opportunities, and responsible deployment

Brighter: Bridging the gap in human-annotated textual emotion recognition datasets for 28 languages

A PhD Student's Perspective on Research in NLP in the Era of Very Large Language Models

Inspiration Detection

Cross-cultural Inspiration Detection and Analysis in Real and LLM-generated Social Media Data

Detecting Inspiring Content on Social Media

Inclusive Language-Vision Models & Datasets

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Vision-Language Models

Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vision-Language Models

Annotations on a Budget: Leveraging Geo-Data Similarity to Balance Model Performance and Annotation Cost

MAiDE-up: Multilingual Deception Detection of GPT-generated Hotel Reviews

OCR Improves Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

Language-Vision Understanding

Scalable Performance Analysis for Vision-Language Models

Fill-in-the-Blank: A Challenging Video Understanding Evaluation Framework

When did it happen? Duration-informed Temporal Localization of Narrated Actions in Vlogs

WhyAct: Identifying Action Reasons in Lifestyle Vlogs

Identifying Visible actions in Lifestyle Vlogs

Autonomous Driving

Disparity image segmentation for free-space detection

My Thesis

My Ph.D. thesis, Towards Human Action Understanding in Social Media Videos using Multimodal Models, and all resources (datasets & models).

My Hobbies