Hi, I'm

Oana Ignat

Interested in applying science to help create a better world

About me

I am a PhD Candidate at University of Michigan, member of the Language and Information Technologies Lab, advised by Rada Mihalcea.
My research is mainly at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision: I work with social media data such as YouTube vlogs and their transcripts.
I am looking to get involved in the AI4Good movement, applying AI in problems that have potential to improve the world (climate change, misinformation, bias, ethics). I am also a fan of hobbies and a healthy work-life balance.

  • Education: PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
  • Expected Graduation Date: August, 2022
  • Location: Ann Arbor, MI, USA
  • Contact: oignat@umich.edu
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Experiences

  • Academia

  • Primary Instructor - University of Michigan

    Fall 2021

    Primary Instructor for Dicover CS (EECS 198), a class primarily designed for underrepresented minorities in CS

  • Graduate Research Assistant - University of Michigan

    2017 - Present

    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.

  • Engineering Teaching Consultant - University of Michigan

    2020 - 2021

    Helping other GSIs/IAs to improve their teaching through one on-one consultations where we discuss challenges they face during teaching. Collecting feedback from students of the GSIs/IAs and discuss it with the student instructor.

  • Graduate Student Instructor - University of Michigan

    2019 - 2020

    EECS 281: Data Structures and Algorithms and EECS 476: Data Mining

  • Industry

  • 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 methods 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.

My Publications

Identifying Visible actions in Lifestyle Vlogs

 Oana Ignat, Laura Burdick, Jia Deng, Rada Mihalcea
  57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)

WhyAct: Identifying Action Reasons in Lifestyle Vlogs

 Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Hanwen Miao, Weiji Li, Rada Mihalcea
 The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021)

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
 ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM 2021)

Detecting Inspiring Content on Social Media

 Oana Ignat, Y-Lan Boureau, Jane A. Yu, Alon Halevy
 9th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2021)

Disparity image segmentation for free-space detection

 Oana Ignat, Cosmin Lazar
 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP 2016)

My Hobbies

Nature
Hiking
Painting
Dance