Tentative Schedule
| Event | Tentative Time (in Eastern Standard Time [GMT-5]) |
| Welcome (Opening Session) | 9:00-9:10 |
| Keynote A: Danish Pruthi | 9:10-10:10 |
| Poster Session A | 10:10-11:00 |
| Panel: Sailing the NLP Seas | 11:00-12:00 |
| Virtual Poster Session | 12:00-12:45 |
| Lunch | 12:45-1:30 |
| Mentorship Session | 1:30-2:10 |
| Panel: Global Voices | 2:10-3:10 |
| Poster Session B | 3:10-4:00 |
| Keynote B: Alham Fikri Aji | 4:00-5:00 |
| Closing Session | 5:00-5:10 |
Speakers
Keynote A
Danish Pruthi
Danish Pruthi is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is broadly interested in the areas of natural language processing and deep learning, with a focus towards inclusive development and evaluation of AI models. He completed his bachelors degree in computer science from BITS Pilani, Pilani. He is also a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, Siebel Scholarship, the CMU Presidential Fellowship and industry awards from Google and Adobe Inc. Until recently, his legal name was only Danish—an “edge case” for many deployed NLP systems, leading to airport quagmires and, in equal parts, funny anecdotes.Keynote B
Alham Fikri Aji
Alham Fikri Aji is an assistant professor of Natural Language Processing at Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi. His research focuses on multilingual and cross-lingual NLP, particularly for under-resourced languages and communities. He has experience in constructing culturally nuanced datasets for NLP, including collaborative efforts in data creation. He is an active member of the South-East Asia NLP community, SEACrowd.Panel A: Global Voices – Celebrating Diversity in Minds, Methods and MultiLingualism
Sunipa Dev
Sunipa Dev is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research, working at the intersection of language, society, and technology. Previously, she was an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow at UCLA, before which she completed her PhD from the University of Utah. Her research strives to ground evaluations of generative AI, especially language technologies in real world experiences of people, and foster inclusion of diverse, cross-cultural, and marginalized perspectives into AI pipelines. Her work has been awarded with an Outstanding Paper award ACL 2023, the NSF CI Fellows Award and DAAD AINet Award 2021, and she has been named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2022. She is also an advisor for the Widening NLP at *CL conferences which argues the importance of diversity and inclusion in NLP for better technologies of the future.
Khyati Raghavi Chandu
Khyathi Chandu is an AI Research Scientist at the Mistral. Prior to this, she worked at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and Meta AI. She was a visiting professor at the Jio Institute. Her research primarily focuses on building reliable, contextual, and trustworthy multimodal models, and interactive agents for complex reasoning and training large language models. She is a part of the teams that developed the open LLM from AI2, model alignment, large scale pretraining data, and other evaluation benchmarks. She completed her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University on grounded multimodal long-form generation from the Language Technologies Institute advised by Alan W. Black, Eric Nyberg and Yonatan Bisk. She is selected as a Rising Star by UC Berkeley EECS in 2020, led the team that won the sixth edition of the BioAsq Challenge and was awarded the Best All-Rounder Student in her undergraduation. She is active in the NLP community, serving as an Area Chair at NeuRIPS, COLM, ACL ARR. She actively also organized several workshops on generation at *CL conferences.
Dirk Hovy
Dirk Hovy is a Professor in the Computing Sciences Department of Bocconi University, and the scientific director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit. He holds a PhD in NLP from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and a master’s degree in linguistics from Marburg University in Germany. Dirk is interested in what computers can tell us about language, and what language can tell us about society. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in machine learning. He has authored over 150 articles on these topics, including 3 best and one outstanding paper awards, and published two textbooks on NLP in Python for social scientists. Dirk has co-founded and organized several workshops (on computational social science, and ethics and cultural aspects in NLP), and was a local organizer for the EMNLP 2017 conference. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant project 2020 for research on demographic bias in NLP. Outside of work, Dirk enjoys cooking, leather-crafting, and picking up heavy things just to put them back down.Monojit Choudhury
Monojit Choudhury is a professor of Natural Language Processing at Mohommed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi. Prior to this, he was a principal scientist at Microsoft Research Lab and Microsoft Turing, India. He is also a professor of practice at Plaksha University, and an adjunct professor at IIIT Hyderabad. Prof Choudhury’s research interests lie in the intersection of NLP, Social and Cultural aspects of Technology use, and Ethics. In particular, he has been working on multilinx gual and multicultural aspects of large language models (LLMs), their use in low resource languages and making LLMs more inclusive and safer by addressing bias and fairness aspects. Prof Choudhury is the general chair of Indian national linguistics Olympiad and the founding co-chair of Asia-Pacific linguistics Olympiad. He holds a BTech and PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.Malihe Alikhani
Malihe Alikhani is an assistant professor of AI and social justice at the Khoury School of Computer Science at Northeastern University and a member of the Northeastern Ethics Institute. She is also a Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) fellow. Her work focuses on studying and addressing biases in learning models, particularly in applications related to education, health, and social justice. This goal has led her to collaborate with educators, healthcare experts, and community leaders to create inclusive, technology-enabled experiences. Alikhani’s research aims to design inclusive and equitable language technologies that effectively communicate across diverse populations, with a special focus on underserved communities. By integrating insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, policy, and social sciences with machine learning techniques, she develops computational models that capture the rich diversity of human interpretation and enhance the communicative power of language.Panel B: Sailing the NLP Seas – Navigating Research in the Age of LLMs
Abhilasha Ravichandran
Abhilasha Ravichander is a postdoctoral scholar at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering at University of Washington. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. Abhilasha is broadly interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and her research addresses the robustness and interpretability of NLP systems, with a focus on analyzing, evaluating, and improving models and datasets.Sunayana Sitaram
Sunayana Sitaram is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India. Her research goal is to make AI more inclusive to everyone on the planet by improving the evaluation, quality and safety of Language Models on all languages. Sunayana served as the director of the MSR India Research Fellow program (2022-2024), which exposes bright young researchers to a world-class research environment and prepares them for careers in research, engineering and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining MSRI as a Post Doc Researcher in 2016, Sunayana completed her MS and PhD at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. Sunayana’s research has been published in top NLP and ML conferences including *ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, Interspeech, ICASSP and she regularly serves in the program committee of these conferences. In 2023, she served as Industry track co-chair and Senior Area Chair for ACL 2023 and EMNLP 2023, and in 2024 she served as Area Chair at CoLM. She has organized special sessions and workshops on under-resourced languages, code-switching, multilingual evaluation and speech for social good. She has also led the creation of several benchmarks and datasets in codeswitching, speech recognition and speech synthesis that have been used by research groups all over the world.Isabelle Augenstein
Isabelle Augenstein is a Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science, where she heads the Copenhagen Natural Language Understanding research group as well as the Natural Language Processing section. Her main research interests are fair and accountable NLP, including challenges such as explainability, factuality and bias detection. Prior to starting a faculty position, she was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, and before that a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. In October 2022, Isabelle Augenstein became Denmark’s youngest ever female full professor. She currently holds a prestigious ERC Starting Grant on ’Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking’, as well as the Danish equivalent of that, a DFF Sapere Aude Research Leader fellowship on ’Learning to Explain Attitudes on Social Media’. She is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and President of SIGDAT, which organises the EMNLP conference series.Lu Wang
Lu Wang is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and her bachelor degrees in Intelligent Science and Technology and Economics from Peking University. Her research focuses on natural language processing, in particular building trustworthy language models (LMs) that offer factual, accurate, safe, and fair uses, and developing reliable evaluations for them. She has also been working on building AI applications for education and computational social science. Lu received an area chair award at ACL 2024, a best paper honorable mention award at CHI 2023, an outstanding paper award at ACL 2017, and a best paper nomination award at SIGDIAL 2012. She won the NSF CAREER award in 2021. Lu co-founded ACL Special Interest Group on Summarization (SIGSUMM). Lu serves as Program co-Chair of NAACL 2025. She currently serves as ACL Equity Director.Mrinmaya Sachan
Mrinmaya Sachan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. His research is in the area of Natural language processing and the interface of Machine learning and Education. Prior to this position, Mrinmaya was a Research Assistant Professor at TTI Chicago. Before that, he received a Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at CMU and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur where he received an Academic Excellence Award. He has received several awards for his work, including outstanding paper awards at ACL and EMNLP, an IBM PhD fellowship, the Siebel scholarship and the CMU CMLH fellowship. His current research is funded by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ETH Zurich foundation and Haslerstiftung.