Joan Nwatu

New Paper Alert!‼️ 🌍 Culture Affordance Atlas: Teaching AI to See the World as People Actually Live It (Joint work with Longju Bai @Longju_Bai, Oana Ignat @OanaIgnatRo, and Rada Mihalcea @radamihalcea)

@michigan_AI Thank you so much! I am grateful for this recognition!

Congratulations to PhD candidate Joan Nwatu @_agirlyengineer, recipient of the Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement! 🎓 Her exceptional research and academic excellence earned this well-deserved recognition. #InternationalWomensMonth cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/joan-n…

@radamihalcea Thank you so much, Rada. You are one of the biggest reasons I am where I am today ♥️

I am so proud of Joan and everything she has accomplished! It’s been a joy watching her grow as a researcher, collaborator, and leader, and I feel very fortunate to work alongside her on this journey. Congratulations, Joan — so well deserved! 👏❤️ @_agirlyengineer ai.engin.umich.edu/stories/joan-n…

We’re proud to celebrate PhD candidate Joan Nwatu @_agirlyengineer, recipient of the Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement! 🎓 Her exceptional research and academic excellence earned this well-deserved recognition. #InternationalWomensMonth cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/joan-n…

I’m very happy to see this paper out, on AI-driven solutions to address poverty challenges. It’s been a year in the making, with collaborators from Poverty Solutions, Social Work, Public Health, and more. The intersection of AI & poverty is one of the least studied areas of AI research, in part because of the risks posed by this technology. In this paper, we examine how AI can be applied to some of the barriers faced by individuals and communities living in poverty (eg, food and housing insecurity, unequal access to healthcare and education, limited mobility), and also explicitly address the risks (eg, widening socio-economic gaps, job displacement). We outline directions where AI can meaningfully contribute to poverty alleviation, as well as strategies to mitigate harm. Our hope is that those who are now starting in AI, or those on the lookout for new impactful problems to solve, will take some of these ideas and put them into practice. 📝 web.eecs.umich.edu/~mihalcea/pape… 👥 Laura Lein, @AnganaBorah2, Zara Burzo, Ron Eglash, Mazhad Khoshlessan, @ZhijingJin, Ram Mahalingam, Joan Nwatu @_agirlyengineer, Minal R. Patel, Álvaro Vega-Hidalgo, Tiffany Wu, Rada Mihalcea

Really excited about this upcoming #AAAI2026 paper led by my amazing PhD student Joan Nwatu. By reorganizing objects around what they are used for, rather than how they look, we show meaningful reductions in socioeconomic performance gaps in vision–language models. We introduce the Culture Affordance Atlas, a culturally grounded re-annotation of Dollar Street that surfaces overlooked objects and improves model performance in lower-income contexts. 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2512.03173 🔗 lit.eecs.umich.edu/Culture-Afford… 👥 Joan Nwatu @_agirlyengineer, @Longju_Bai, @OanaIgnatRo, @RadaMihalcea

Very happy to be elected as a fellow of my home research community, ACL. And so very proud to be in such amazing company—congratulations to all the fellows!👏 I am grateful to the many collaborators and students who have shaped my work and made me who I am today.❤️ aclweb.org/portal/content…

Check out our website lit.eecs.umich.edu/Culture-Afford…. Read the full paper on arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/2512.03173.

Our research shows that this approach significantly reduces AI performance gaps between high- and low-income communities and helps AI work more reliably for people the tech world has historically overlooked. Work to appear at AAAI 2026, the AAAI Social Impact Track.

🛏️ What if a “bed” isn’t always a bed? Across the world, people sleep on very different objects: charpais, straw mats, king-sized frames, but AI systems trained on Western images rarely recognize their “bed” function.

New Paper Alert!‼️ 🌍 Culture Affordance Atlas: Teaching AI to See the World as People Actually Live It (Joint work with Longju Bai @Longju_Bai, Oana Ignat @OanaIgnatRo, and Rada Mihalcea @radamihalcea)

🔥Welcome to joining our #NeurIPS2025 ResponsibleFM Workshop today! 🗓️Nov 30th 1pm-8pm CST 📍Hilton Mexico City Reforma (Room: Don Alberto 1) 🌐responsible-fm.github.io 🥳Looking forward to learning fresh insights on Socially Responsible and Trustworthy Foundation Models from our amazing lineup of speakers! @Yoshua_Bengio @Diyi_Yang @sanmikoyejo @radamihalcea @_agirlyengineer @denghui_zhang @aylin_cim @krvarshney 👉The workshop will be streamed on NeurIPS website: neurips.cc/virtual/2025/l… 🙌The organizers: @CanyuChen3 @HowieH36226 @frank_liu_01 @YilunZhao_NLP @ZRChen_AISafety @haoyue_bai @xuandongzhao @YiyouSun @hjy836 @xuefeng_du @Jindong73504766 @armancohan @xiangliangzhang @ManlingLi_ Big thanks to the advisors: @dawnsongtweets @YejinChoinka @mohitban47 @rdnowak

Excited to announce that TODAY PhD candidate @_agirlyengineer Joan Nwatu joins the panel discussion at the African Women Film Festival! 🎬Panel 5 (12:45–2:00): Technologies, #AI, & the Future of Filmmaking in Africa 📍Michigan League, Vandenberg Room 🔗 ii.umich.edu/asc/news-event…

We present Eeyore—a language model that simulates depression for mental‑health training. It leverages curated real-world conversations, expert-verified psychological profiles, instruction tuning, and preference optimization. Link: github.com/MichiganNLP/Ee… aclanthology.org/2025.findings-…

Very proud of my lab’s work to be presented at #NAACL2025, all aligned with this year’s special theme on NLP in a multicultural world 🌎 Come find us throughout the conference!

Tomorrow at #AAAI25 we’ll present our paper “Why AI is W.E.I.R.D.* and why it shouldn’t be”— a position paper on challenges & opportunities in developing AI that works equally well for everyone. 🌍🌎🌏 arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16315 This is the result of a truly global collaboration, bringing together perspectives from across 12 countries and 5 continents: @OanaIgnatRo, @Longju_Bai, @AnganaBorah2, @luischiruzzo, @ZhijingJin, @KwizeraEager, Joan Nwatu @_agirlyengineer, @SoujanyaPoria, @Thamar_Solorio, & myself Th 2/27, 2:30pm, SMT s2, rm 125 *Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—a concept from psychology.

Klarna was the company that went all-on replacing customer support with an AI bot and went on to brag about the cost savings. Now they are reversing course. Easy to see more companies blindly replacing quality customer support with a worse AI implementation will follow...