About Me
I am a PhD candidate 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
2025
🏢 Starting my summer internship at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute.
🏆 Our CHI 2024 paper on need finding with low-resourced language Wikipedia contributors won the Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year Award!!!
📝 Our paper on using RAG for Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion got into ACL 2025 Findings. Paper link coming soon!!
📝 Our paper with Hahan Aldarmaki got accepted to AfricaNLP 2025.
📝 Our short paper on Historical Language Reconstruction for Geez, Tigrinya, and Amharic was accepted to COLING 2025! I am super proud of my collaborator Elleni Sisay who will soon graduate with her MSc from AAU!!
2024
🏆 Our paper on online harm due to policy-violating sexual content on YouTube in Amharic won the Best Paper Award at Black In AI :-)
🎊 I passed my qualification exam and am now a PhD Candidate!!
🏆 Our paper on surveying how Low-Resource Languages are defined in NLP literature won an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2024!!
📝 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
2023
🎊 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!!
2022
🎊 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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