About Me
I am an incoming postdoc at the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin. I recently received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. I finished my undergrad at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in Electrical and Computer Engineering and received my Master of Science in CS from UC Berkeley in 2023. I was co-advised by Prof. Sarah Chasins and Prof. John Canny. During my PhD studies, I was 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
2026
🎊 I am beyond excited to announce I will be joining the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab under the supervision of Dr. Abeba Birhane. I am excited for all the research that is going to come out of this journey.
📝 Yet another extension of the work on understanding gender bias in MT datasets has been accepted to the GITT workshop!! In this version, “Yeswa-Stories: A Three-Way Parallel Dataset of Female African Figures in Low-Web Data Languages,” we present a three-way parallel dataset exclusively focused on stories of women figures and cultural practices centering women.
📝 An extension of the paper on MT dataset evaluation has been accepted as a non-archival paper to the AfricaNLP workshop 2026. In this version, we specifically use Masked Language Models and train them using popular MT datasets to understand the encoded gender bias. You can find the paper here.
📝 Our paper “Evaluating Machine Translation Datasets for Low-Web Data Languages: A Gendered Lens” has been accepted to the findings of ACL 2026!! I am so proud of the team who worked on this project!!!
📝 Starting the year strong with a paper accepted to CHI’26 on the bias faced by Global Majority researchers in peer-review. It was an absolute joy to co-first author this with Farhana Shahid and the rest of the wonderful team!
2025
🎊 I graduated!! This PhD journey has truly been a transformational experience that I will cherish forever. Excited for the road ahead!! You can find my dissertation here.
📝 Our paper on Errors in Machine Translation for healthcare in low-resourced languages has been accepted to EMNLP 2025!! (Two papers in EMNLP this year :-))
📝 Our paper arguing against homophone normalization in pre-processing for languages that use the Ge’ez script has been accepted to EMNLP 2025!!
📝 Our paper on Health Information Seeking on Online Platforms in Low-Resourced Languages accepted to AIES 2025!!! Thank you to my amazing collaborators :-)
🏢 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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