Nov 2025: I gave a joint keynote with my advisor, Rada!
At the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Socially Responsible and Trustworthy Foundation Models .
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Joan Nwatu
Joan Chinasa Nwatu
Joan Nwatu
Fourth year CSE PhD Candidate @UMich
I am a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor , and a member of the Language and Information Technologies Lab where Professor Rada Mihalcea advises me.
I am interested in improving representation in AI, specifically in computer vision, language and multimodal applications.
As much as I enjoy experiencing and learning new things, I love writing about them too. Feel free to check out my blog articles about AI, math, and other exciting topics!
Recent News
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!!
Education
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
Research and Publications
Latest Blog Posts
Get in touch
If you would like to discuss research or hangout or explore a wholesome new activity, do not hesitate to reach me.
- jnwatu@umich.edu
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
USA