Hellina Nigatu
Hellina Hailu Nigatu | ህሊና ሀይሉ ንጋቱ
📧 hellina underscore nigatu at berkeley dot edu
CV
I am a second year PhD student at University of California, Berkeley in the EECS department. I finished my undergrad at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia in Electrical and Computer Engineering. 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-resource languages. I am also interested in the impact of AI on society, specifically in how it affects Low Income Countries and people living in the Global South.
Outside of research, I like to read books📚, make and drink traditional Ethiopian coffee☕, knit🧣, explore art🎨, and write✍️.
News
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.
Publications
Andrew McCrabb, Hellina Nigatu, Absalat Getachew, Valeria Bertacco. “DyGraph: a dynamic graph generator and benchmark suite.” Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGMOD Joint International Workshop on Graph Data Management Experiences & Systems (GRADES) and Network Data Analytics (NDA). 2022
Chris Chinenye Emezue, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Cynthia Thinwa, Lerato Louis, Idris Abdulmumin, Samuel Gbenga Oyerinde, Benjamin Ayoade Ajibade, Helper Zhou, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Handel Chiagozie Emezue, Ifeoluwatayo Adeseye Ige, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Olanrewaju Samuel. “The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages” 3rd Workshop on African Natural Language Processing. 2022
Talks
- Build Your Case: Using AI and HCI to aid Document Organization Invited talk at Stanford for Watchdog Reporting Class April 2022 Stanford, CA
- Detecting and Exploring Replicated Files in Large Document Dumps: A demonstration workshop for investigative journalists on using a document organizing tool I am building. April 2022 Stanford, CA
Teaching
- Fall 2022: Gave a guest Lecture for Beauty and Joy of Computing class at Berkeley.
- Summer 2022: Served as TA for the MIMS Python Bootcamp organized by the School of Information at Berkeley.
Service
- Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS), E-Board Member Since 2021
- BAIR ReU, Committee Member Since 2021
- JUAMI-Open Compute Facility, Communications Lead 2021-2022.
- MVC workshop oragnizer, 2023
- Berkeley NLP Seminar, Organizing Member Since 2022
- FAccT Volunteer Chair, 2023
- CHI, Reviewer 2022
- Deep Learning Indaba, Reviewer 2022
- HMCaT at ICML, PC member 2022
- NeurIPS ML4D, Reviewer 2021