Joan Nwatu

Nov 2025: I gave a joint keynote with my advisor, Rada!

At the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Socially Responsible and Trustworthy Foundation Models .

Nov 2025: I was a panelist!

At the African Women Film Festival 2025 on the panel for the Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and the future of Filmmaking in Africa discussion.

Nov 2025: My third research followup on the digital divide in AI is out!

Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping will be presented at AAAI 2026. See you at Changi, Singapore! This is work is a nice follow up on the 'Bridging the Digital Divide paper and Uplifting Lower Income Data'. Check it out!

Jan 2025: My second research baby on the digital divide in AI is out!

Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Large Multi-modal Models will be presented at NAACL 2025. See you at Albuquerque, New Mexico! This is work is a nice follow up on the 'Bridging the Digital Divide paper'. Check it out!

Jan 2025: I am teaching as a Graduate Student Instructor for the first time this winter!

I am learning a lot from the students and my fellow instructors in the Information Retrieval course.

Dec 2024: Our paper on representation in AI research is to be presented at AAAI 2025

Why AI Is WEIRD and Should Not Be This Way: Towards AI For Everyone, With Everyone, By Everyone

Oct 2024: The paper for an exciting project I worked on with my labmates and collaborators from MBZUAI and Masakhane got accepted to NeurIPS 2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

April 2024: I presented my research at the ASC 15th-Year Anniversary Conference !

Feb 2024: 2 Papers I co-authored got accepted to COLING 2024

Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models
Annotations on a Budget: Leveraging Geo-Data Similarity to Balance Model Performance and Annotation Cost

Feb 2024: I passed my Prelims!

I am now a PhD Candidate!

Oct 2023: My very first research paper was accepted to EMNLP 2023!

Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vison-Language Models will appear at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. See you in Sentosa Island, Singapore!!

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Expected graduation in 2027 with Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering

University of Nigeria, Nsukka

Graduated in 2019 with B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering