Hi, I'm

Oana Ignat

Interested in applying science to help create a better world

About me

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.

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

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

    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

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

My Publications

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
 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022)

OCR Improves Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

 Oana Ignat, Jean Maillard, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzmán
 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings ACL 2022)

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)

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)

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)

Identifying Visible actions in Lifestyle Vlogs

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

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