Interested in applying science to help create a better world
I am a 5th year PhD Candidate at University of Michigan, member of the Language and Information Technologies Lab,
advised by Rada Mihalcea.
I will defend my thesis in August 2022 and starting this Fall, I am open for full-time positions in applied research.
My work is mainly at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision:
I work with social media videos such as YouTube vlogs and their transcripts, to develop datasets and models for human action understanding.
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.
Primary Instructor for Dicover CS (EECS 198), a class primarily designed for underrepresented minorities in CS
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.
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.
EECS 281: Data Structures and Algorithms and EECS 476: Data Mining
Mentored by Paco Guzman, Vishrav Chaudhary and Jean Maillard, I implemented and presented research on OCR impact in Machine Translation for low resource languages.
Mentored by Alon Halevy, Jane Yu and Y-Lan Boureau, I implemented and presented research on Identifying and Analyzing Inspiration in social media data.
Research and implement efficient methods for road detection using raw images from mobile phones.
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.
 Santiago Castro, Ruoyao Wang, Pingxuan Huang, Ian Stewart, Oana Ignat, Nan Liu, Jonathan C. Stroud, Rada Mihalcea
 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022)
 Oana Ignat, Jean Maillard, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzmán
 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings ACL 2022)
 Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Hanwen Miao, Weiji Li, Rada Mihalcea
 The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021)
 Oana Ignat, Y-Lan Boureau, Jane A. Yu, Alon Halevy
 9th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2021)
 Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Yuhang Zhou, Jiajun Bao, Dandan Shan, Rada Mihalcea
 ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM 2021)
 Oana Ignat, Laura Burdick, Jia Deng, Rada Mihalcea
  Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)
 Oana Ignat, Cosmin Lazar
 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP 2016)