Welcome to

AIM

Inclusive & Multimodal AI

About AIM Lab

AIM advances Artificial Intelligence (AI) research at the intersection of Language and Vision by building and evaluating novel multimodal models, tasks, and datasets.

Our mission is to make AI equitable across diverse demographics, spanning income levels, languages, cultures, age groups, and gender.
We emphasize inclusive, responsible, and equitable approaches that address real-world challenges.

To ensure impact beyond the lab, we collaborate with organizations such as the Miller Center for Global Impact and the Frugal Innovation Hub.

We co-host at ACL Mentorship, global panel sessions with AI research experts from academia and industry. Open to everyone, especially the underrepresented!

More information about living in Santa Clara, SCU, and the PhD program.

Ultimately, research is for people and can enable demographic-aware technologies that make a lasting positive impact on society.

Lab Members

Current

Profile 1

Oana Ignat

Assistant Professor

oignat at scu

Profile 2

Parth Bhalerao

PhD Student

pbhalerao at scu

Profile 2

Yuming Zhao

Master Student

yzhao4 at scu

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Ragha Yalamarty

Master Student

ryalamarty at scu

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Shuowei Li

Master Student

sli19 at scu

Alumni

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Arushi Mangla

Master Student

amangla at scu

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Brian Trinh

Master Student

btrinh at scu

Selected Publications (Paper, Poster & Code)

AI for All

Why AI Is WEIRD and Shouldn't Be This Way: Towards AI for Everyone, with Everyone, by Everyone

  Rada Mihalcea*, Oana Ignat*, Longju Bai, {...}
  AAAI 2025

NLP for Social Good: A survey of challenges, opportunities, and responsible deployment

  Antonia Karamolegkou, {...}, Oana Ignat, {...}
  Under Review

Brighter: Bridging the gap in human-annotated textual emotion recognition datasets for 28 languages

  Shamsudden H Muhammad, {...}, Oana Ignat, {...}
  ACL 2025
🏆 Best Resource Paper Award

MAiDE-up: Multilingual Deception Detection of GPT-generated Hotel Reviews

  Oana Ignat, Xiaomeng Xu, Rada Mihalcea
 NAACL 2025

Inspiration Detection

Cross-cultural Inspiration Detection and Analysis in Real and LLM-generated Social Media Data

  Oana Ignat*, Gayathri Ganesh Lakshmy*, Rada Mihalcea
  C3NLP at NAACL 2025
🏆 Best Paper Award

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
  NeurIPS 2025

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

  Joan Nwatu, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea
  NAACL 2025