Oana Ignat
I am interested in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Applied Mathematics.
My current research involves detecting visible human activities from
transcribed YouTube videos.
Before starting my PhD, I worked in the R&D industry on developing
algorithms for self-driving cars.
I'm looking to get involved in the ai4good movement, applying AI in problems that have potential
to improve the world (climate change, social science, ethics).
I am a PhD Candidate at University of Michigan, member of the Language and Information Technologies lab,
co-advised by
Rada Mihalcea and Jia Deng. I'm also a fan of hobbies and a healthy work-life balance.
News
-
13th August
I've started a blog!! It's on this page and it's been on my mind for quite some time. -
6th August
Visiting Italy for the first time! wanted to do it big style: Napoli, Rome, Florence, Milano, Lake Como (Bellano), Venice - checked -
28th July
Attending ACL in Florence, Italy, where I will be presenting a poster for our paper -
21st July
Volunteering for AI4ALL, a program that teaches high school students AI through projects related to ai4good (climate change, social science, ethics, medical) -
1st July
Participating at EEML, a very cool Machine Learning summer school, which I highly recommend!
Experience
Graduate Research Assistant
- Identifying Visible actions in Lifestyle Vlogs paper, accepted to ACL 2019
- Best poster award won at EEML 2019 summer school
- Code & Dataset
- Volunteer for AI4ALL- introduced high school students to AI by teaching them how to code in python and implement an NLP project related to social good: work with HappyDB dataset.
- Attended and volunteered for NAACL 2019
- Attended and presented at EEML 2019 - Eastern European Machine Learning summer school
Image Processing Developer
- Research and implement efficient methods for road detection using raw images from mobile phones
- Implement camera calibration algorithm
- 3D reconstruction of scenes using structure from motion
- Road texture classification using unsupervised clustering algorithms
Image Processing Intern
- Disparity image segmentation for free-space detection paper, accepted to ICCP 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 paper was used by Daimler AG to speed up their road detection algorithms
Education
University of Michigan
- Advanced Topics in Computer Vision
- Natural Language Processing
- Matrix Methods for Signal Processing
- AI Foundations
- Advanced AI
GPA: 3.7
Publications
Identifying Visible actions in Lifestyle Vlogs
Oana Ignat, Laura Burdick, Jia Deng, Rada Mihalcea
Dataset & Code
ACL 2019
Disparity image segmentation for free-space detection
Oana Ignat, Cosmin Lazar
ICCP 2016
Awards
- Best Poster Award EEML summer school, 2019
- Fulbright Student Award Finalist, 2017
-
Best thesis award in Artificial Intelligence for the entire class of 2016 graduates at the
“Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca.
Awarded by the Romanian Institute of Science and Technology, July 1, 2016 - 2nd Place - Scientific Communication Sessions for Students ClujNapoca, June 16, 2016
- Jane Street ‘Women in STEM’ Finalist, 2016
-
Over the years I took part in over 60 Mathematics competitions. Here are some of my most
important results:
- 1st Prize - National competition in Mathematics “Euclid” 2013
- National Olympiad in Mathematics 2012
- 1st Place - Inter County competition in Mathematics “Dimitrie Pompeiu” 2012
- 1st Place - Regional Mathematics Olympiad 2012
- 1st Prize - National competition in Mathematics “Euclid” 2012
- 2nd Place - Regional Mathematics Olympiad 2011
- 2nd Prize - National competition in Mathematics “Euclid” 2011
- Regional Olympiad in Mathematics 2010
- 2nd Place - Regional Mathematics Olympiad 2009
- National Olympiad in Mathematics 2009
Hobbies
Blog
with my friends, parents or anyone interested.
