About Me

I am a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley in the EECS department. I finished my undergrad at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia in Electrical and Computer Engineering and received my Masters of Science in CS from UC Berkeley in 2023. I am currently co-advised by Prof. Sarah Chasins and Prof. John Canny. I am part of PLAIT, CannyLab and BAIR.

My research interest broadly lies in the intersection of AI and HCI, with a focus on making usable AI tools accessible to end users. I am currently looking into making NLP tools usable and accessible for low-resourced languages. I am also interested in the impact of AI on society, specifically in how it affects Global Majority countries and communities.

Outside of research, I like to read books📚, make and drink traditional Ethiopian coffee☕, knit🧣, explore art🎨, and write✍️.

News

Paper surveying how Low-Resource Languages are defined in NLP literature accepted to EMNLP Main conference 🎊.

[Video] Gave a talk on our accepted Extended Abstract at the Workshop on New Perspectives in Bias and Discrimination.

Essay on Exploitation of Global Majority in Current AI Ecosystem Accepted to the DAIG Dynamic Coalition 🎊.

Happy to announce I have been selected to be one of the FAccT DEI Scholars for 2024! I will be using the fund to support two MSc and 2 BSc women students from Addis Ababa Institute of Technology on a one-year research program in Machine Translation. More details to come!

Started my summer Visiting Student internship at MBZUAI working with Prof. Monojit Choudhury.

Presented our CHI’24 paper at the NorthEast HCI Meeting.

Presented poster on our Online Harm FAccT’24 paper at the Stanford-Berkeley Research Meetup.

Paper on online harm due to policy-violating sexual content on YouTube in Amharic Accepted to FAccT 2024

Paper on need-finding work with low-resourced language contributors and their interaction with online knowledge repository accepted to CHI 2024

I received the ACM-W scholarship to attend EMNLP’23 where I will be presenting my work. Thank you to the ACM-W scholarship and Google for sponsoring my travel.

LLM evaluation work [poster] done with my mentee Bontu Fufa Balcha from my course accepted to two workshops!! Black in AI workshop co-located with NeurIPS’23 and WiNLP workshop co-located with EMNLP’23.

I built a library…not the code type…a physical library 🏫…where you find books :-). Read more about it here.

I will be TAing for Addis Coder in Summer 2023!!

Finally translated my website content to Amharic. More languages to come :-))

Was an invited speaker at the Wade Scholarship Program welcome event for 2022 Scholars.

Delighted to announce I am one of the 2022 winners of the SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowship.

Excited to be featured with other Ethiopian women in STEM on BBC Amharic.

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