Dr. Oana Ignat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at 911±¬ÁÏÍø. She earned her Ph.D. and completed her postdoctoral training in Computer Science at the University of Michigan in 2022.
Dr. Ignat directs the , where she and her students study Artificial Intelligence at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). Her research focuses on building multimodal, multilingual, and culturally grounded AI systems that work equitably across diverse populations. A central goal of her work is to address disparities in AI performance across dimensions such as language, culture, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and geography, and to develop benchmarks, datasets, and models that better reflect global diversity.
Dr. Ignat’s work emphasizes AI for social good and responsible deployment, with applications spanning emotion understanding, cross-cultural reasoning, low-resource languages, and socioeconomic fairness in foundation models. She has published extensively at top venues including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, and AAAI, and her research has received multiple best paper and best resource awards. Her contributions include widely used benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for multilingual emotion recognition, cross-cultural multimodal reasoning, and fairness analysis of large vision–language models.
Beyond research, Dr. Ignat is deeply committed to broadening participation in computing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds. She is a co-organizer of the workshop series at ACL and EMNLP, has led SemEval shared tasks on emotion recognition in low-resource languages, and plays an active role in the , helping early-career researchers navigate academia and industry worldwide. Through her research, teaching, and outreach, she aims to ensure that AI technologies are developed with and for the diverse communities they impact.
- CSEN 498: Ph.D. Thesis
- CSEN 497: Master's Thesis
- CSEN 493: Industry-Mentored Projects (AI Practicum) under MS in AI
- CSEN 346: Natural Language Processing
- CSEN 266: Artificial Intelligence
- CSEN 140: Machine Learning and Data Mining
- CSEN 29: AI Literacy
- CSEN 12: Data Structures and Algorithms
An up-to-date publication list is available on .
- Antonia Karamolegkou, … Oana Ignat, … Daryna Dementieva.
EACL 2026
Joan Nwatu, Longju Bai, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea.
AAAI 2026
Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, … Oana Ignat, … Saif M. Mohammad.
ACL 2025 — Best Resource Paper Award
Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, … Oana Ignat, … Saif M. Mohammad.
SemEval @ ACL 2025 — Best Task Award
Oana Ignat, Gayathri GI, Rada Mihalcea.
C3NLP Workshop @ NAACL 2025 — Best Paper Award
Longju Bai, Angana Borah, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea.
NAACL 2025
Joan Nwatu, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea.
NAACL 2025
Oana Ignat, Phoebe Xu, Rada Mihalcea.
NAACL 2025
Rada Mihalcea, Oana Ignat, Longju Bai, Angana Borah, Luis Chiruzzo, Zhijing Jin,
Claude Kwizera, Joan Nwatu, Soujanya Poria, Thamar Solorio.
AAAI 2025
David Romero, … Oana Ignat, Joan Nwatu, Rada Mihalcea, Thamar Solorio, Alham F. Aji.
NeurIPS 2024
Oana Ignat, Longju Bai, Joan Nwatu, Rada Mihalcea.
LREC-COLING 2024
Oana Ignat, Zhijing Jin, … Rada Mihalcea.
LREC-COLING 2024
Oana Ignat, Jingru Yi, Burak Uzkent, Linda Liu.
WACV 2024
Joan Nwatu, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea.
EMNLP 2023
Santiago Castro, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea.
*SEM @ ACL 2023
Santiago Castro, Ruoyao Wang, Pingxuan Huang, Ian Stewart, Oana Ignat,
Nan Liu, Jonathan C. Stroud, Rada Mihalcea.
ACL 2022
Oana Ignat, Jean Maillard, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzmán.
ACL 2022
Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Hanwen Miao, Weiji Li, Rada Mihalcea.
EMNLP 2021
Oana Ignat, Y-Lan Boureau, Jane A. Yu, Alon Halevy.
ACII 2021
Oana Ignat, Laura Burdick, Jia Deng, Rada Mihalcea.
ACL 2019