Hi, I'm

Oana Ignat

Passionate about research & applying science to help create a better world.

About me

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at SCU. I'm hiring kind and self-motivated PhD students! More info. PhD Application form.
Co-host at ACL Mentorship, global panel sessions with AI research experts from academia and industry. Open to everyone, especially the underrepresented!
PhD and Postdoctoral researcher at UMich, 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.

  • Current Work: Assistant Professor, Santa Clara University
  • Education: PhD Computer Science, University of Michigan
  • Location: San Jose, CA, USA
  • Contact: oignat@umich.edu
  • Hometown: Botoșani, Romania
Download Resume

Latest News

August 2024:
Super excited to present at Cohere for AI about the paper Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models! Check out the online event!
July 2024:
Very grateful and honoured to present at the MIT Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory my work on Inclusive Representations for Language-Vision Models. Check out the presentation!
Co-organizing not one but two workshops! Submit your papers to NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI) @EMNLP2024 and Scaling Up Multilingual & Multi-Cultural Evaluation (SUMEval) @COLING2025.
June 2024:
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!
Thrilled to be a panelist at Friday Night AI, discussing AI and the Future of Creative Expressions at Ann Arbor District Library. Great community event! Check out the recording!
May 2024:
Traveled to splendid Italy to present at COLING two papers: "Annotations on a budged" and "NLP in the LLM era".

Work Experience

  • Academia

  • Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Santa Clara University

    September 2024 - Present Hiring PhD students! Apply here.

  • 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)

Selected Publications (Paper, Poster & Code)

AI for All

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
  Under Review

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
  Under Review

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

  Joan Nwatu, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea
  Under Review

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
  Under Review

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

My Thesis

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

PhD@SCU

I'm hiring kind and self-motivated PhD students! More information about living in Santa Clara, SCU, and the PhD program. Complete the PhD Application form.

My Hobbies

Nature
Hiking
Painting
Dance