iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 18/10/2025

i’m looking to recruit a postdoc to work on this (documentation + evaluation on accuracy, reliability and societal impacts). hope to advertise detailed descriptions of the role in the coming weeks

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Book #12 How Dare the Sun Rise? By Sandra Uwiringiyimana from the DRC This was a heavy one...I had to sit for a while with the first few chapters as Sandra recounted her experience of loss and greif...

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Deb Raji @rajiinio.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

There is so much about navigating the Internet in a low resourced language that makes one unnecessarily vulnerable to malicious actors. It's not just a quality of experience difference, but literally the soft belly through which misinformation spreaders attack.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Very excited for our upcoming #AIES paper Into the Void: Understanding Online Health Information in Low-Web Data Languages. Link: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20245 1/n

arxiv.org

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

@meg48.bsky.social's Ethiopian new years gift to me is a new version of HornMorpho exactly as i am working on a project that requires morphological analyzer for Amharic, Tigrinya, and Afan Oromo 💃💃

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Sarah E. Chasins @schasins.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

If you or your students are interested in visualization tools, may I suggest signing up for my student @parkie-doo.sh's study! We're learning *a lot* about how to build direct manipulation programming tools these days! Please pass the sign up link along to your labs! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

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Milagros Miceli @milamiceli.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

I am thrilled to be recognized by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people worldwide in the field of artificial intelligence for my work with @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social. >> #TIME100AI time.com/time100ai I want to take this opportunity to share a few reflections on this work 👇🧵

Portrait of Milagros Miceli in a frame that reads TIME100/AI 2025.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

I am gonna start a tally for every time i have to contend with publication policies at top tier conferences that implicitly stall Global South scholarship.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Lol here is an example: A google translated Tigrinya article: ti.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%88%... English version: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding... I took the part that says "Ethiopia" from the English article and ran it through Google Translate...almost identical output save a few words.

ti.wikipedia.org

ልምዲ መርዓ ብሃገር - ዊኪፐድያ፣ ናጻ ኢንሳይክሎፐድያ

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Book #11 Missing in action and presumed Dead by Rashidah Ismaili from Benin Got this from Thrift Books and by luck got a version with the author signature ☺️ Its a beautiful collection of poems and my fav one is Nomad attached in the picture below

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

This is a good step IMO...but i think we conflate "Wikipedia" with "English Wikipedia" and "AI Generated" with "LLM generated" We should also be having conversations on Machine Translated text in non-English Wikipedia...those are also "AI Generated"😐

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Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo @chinasa.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

My latest work, “Examining the Cultural Encoding of Gender Bias in LLMs for Low-Resourced African Languages,” co-authored with Abigail Oppong and Hellina Nigatu, is now published at the Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing at #ACL2025! aclanthology.org/2025.gebnlp-...

Screenshot of paper on the ACL website with the title (Examining the Cultural Encoding of Gender Bias in LLMs for Low-Resourced African Languages) and abstract that reads: "Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed in several aspects of everyday life. While the technology could have several benefits, like many socio-technical systems, it also encodes several biases. Trained on large, crawled datasets from the web, these models perpetuate stereotypes and regurgitate representational bias that is rampant in their training data. Languages encode gender in varying ways; some languages are grammatically gendered, while others do not. Bias in the languages themselves may also vary based on cultural, social, and religious contexts. In this paper, we investigate gender bias in LLMs by selecting two languages, Twi and Amharic. Twi is a non-gendered African language spoken in Ghana, while Amharic is a gendered language spoken in Ethiopia. Using these two languages on the two ends of the continent and their opposing grammatical gender system, we evaluate LLMs in three tasks: Machine Translation, Image Generation, and Sentence Completion. Our results give insights into the gender bias encoded in LLMs using two low-resourced languages and broaden the conversation on how culture and social structures play a role in disparate system performances."

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Book #10 In the company of Men by Veronique Tadjo of Cote d'Ivoire. A moving story of how Ebola ravaged communities told through different perspectives in each chapter. My fav chapter is when the story is narrated by the Baobab tree. Also touchs on economic politics of healthcare services.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Watching this lecture by Dr. Fasil and Dr. Egid..I have not finished it but thought i would share the link for anyone interested...my main point of interest so far is in difficulty of translating philosophical terms and the role of language in philosophical thought www.youtube.com/live/JwXrGEC...

youtube.com

The Linguistic Politics of Ethiopian Philosophy (Fasil Merawi & Jonathan Egid)

YouTube video by GloPhi – Philosophizing in a Globalized World

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Book #9 Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo from Zambia My first thought is "intriguing." Details how aid harms African communities. However, I think there is little proposed as a practical recourse and that some of the depictions oversimplified the reality.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Book #8 Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar by Emily Ruete Similar to the memoir I read from Leila Abouzeid of Morocco in a lot of ways. There were some difficult and at times painful parts to read, especially as it relates to Blackness and the experiences of Tanzanians and Ethiopians.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Book #7 Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali from Somalia I don't think I can summarize my thoughts about this in a Bluesky post coz i have a lot of negative thoughts😅 so i am not going to attempt. Let's just say it was book #7 and leave it at that.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Book #6 Unbowed by Wangari Maathai from Kenya A rec from @abeba.bsky.social ❤ One of the most powerful memoirs i have read. Many small similarities with growing up in Ethiopia, like being told being out in the rain will make you "grow", the central place fig trees have in the community...

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Book #5 Unsung Giants Who Fought to Keep Africa Free by Okoth Owity Dpap from South Sudan The author uses linguistic evidence for claims about the lineage of his people. How the /ɲ/ sound was removed from many words and that made it difficult to make connections.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Book #4 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie This one i am sneaking in even though i read it years ago (if you know you know) There was a part that stuck with me...when power goes out in the city and comes back, the whole neighborhood cheers. And we do the exact same thing in Addis 😁

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Book #3 Return to Childhood by Leila Abouzeid from Morocco This was interesting in that it was a translation from Arabic and as someone who speaks a bit of Arabic, i could tell small features of the language being reflected :-) Also gave me a glimps into experience of Blackness in Morocco.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

I will be virtually at #ACL2025 next week!!! Virtual poster for bsky.app/profile/hell... Virtual poster for: bsky.app/profile/hell... And an invited talk for AfricaNLP 2025: sites.google.com/view/african...

sites.google.com

AfricaNLP 2025

About the Workshop

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

New paper accepted to AfricaNLP 2025: Exploring Transliteration-Based Zero-Shot Transfer for Amharic ASR with Prof. Hanan Aldarmaki from MBZUAI

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

New paper accepted to the Findings of #ACL2025: mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages. Work done in collaboration with folks from Apple (Min Li, @maartjeterhoeve.bsky.social , Saloni Potdar) and my advisor @schasins.bsky.social

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Book #2 is "No Sweetness Here and Other Stories" by Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana. Fav quote: "But my son, why must you travel that far just to cut grass? Is there not enough of it around here?", a father's response to a son who wants to go abroad to earn more money.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Book #1 is Decolonization and Afro-Feminism by Professor Sylvia Tamale. Was introduced to this book by a long thread on the other platform back in the day by @abeba.bsky.social :-) It has really informed a lot of my research, I even quote it in one of my papers:

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

I started a personal project a while back...Working on African languages, I meet people from all over the continent. I found it very interesting how similar we can be on some things and how drastically different we are on others. So I decided to read one book from each African country...🧵

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

What's up with #ARR May meta-reviews?👀👀

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Are you an HCI researcher from or who studies the Global Majority? Reviewed research about Global Majority for HCI venues? @farhana-shahid.bsky.social & I are conducting research on peer review experience of research by and about Global Majority. participation form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Review Experience of Global Majority Scholars

We invite scholars who are either from the Global Majority or conduct research in the Global Majority to share their experiences of publishing in interdisciplinary venues such as CHI, CSCW, FAccT, Ubi...

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Titania @titaniasrealm.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Me after saying I wasn't gonna buy any more books for a while

Illustration of a squirrel carrying a pile of books, walking towards a tree hollow full of books.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

You know the feeling when you find cash in an old pair of pants you have not worn in a while? Been dragging my feet on making slides for a paper presentation only to find i already made the presentation 2 months ago for an internal lab event (before i knew the paper was accepted)😁😁

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Am i the only one confused by the #ARR policy that as an author you get to flag reviewers AFTER the author response period is over? Is it to give reviewers the chance to correct their review?

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

ACM FAccT @facct.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

We're happy to officially announce the location of #FAccT2026! Next year's conference will be held in Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦 Su Lin Blodgett and Zeerak Talat will be General Chairs, and Michael Madaio will be PC Chair 🎉 (thanks to MindView for the photo!)

Photo of the Town Hall meeting at last week's conference. The audience watches as Su Lin Blodgett announces the location of next year's conference. Su Lin Blodgett and Zeerak Talat will be General Chairs, and Michael Madaio will be PC Chair.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

At a time i am experiencing a local maxima in my level of impostor syndrome, just got home to find these delivered to my door step :-) thank you @wikimediafoundation.org @wikiresearch.bsky.social

A picture of a certificate that says "research award of the year" and physical barnstar that says "wikimedia foundation research award of the year"

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

How do you deal with a review that you are pretty sure is LLM generated but have "no definitive way of determining" it is LLM generated 😌

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

EMNLP @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

For EMNLP 2025's special theme of Advancing our Reach: Interdisciplinary Recontextualization of NLP, we are organizing a panel of experts, and would like your input! Please help us prepare by completing this survey: forms.office.com/r/pWFFA0Gss1

forms.office.com

Microsoft Forms

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Been a hectic semester for me but made it through 😊 a few updates Had a blast as a GSI for @dbamman.bsky.social NLP class. Was a wonderful experience 💃 Won the Wikipedia Foundation Research of The Year Award for our CHI paper(doi.org/10.1145/3613...) with @schasins.bsky.social and John Canny

doi.org

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

#Linguistics friends, is there a term to describe the following phenomenon: Characters in an alphabet that have the same sound in one language but distinct sounds in another language due to language evolution. In Amharic ኣ and ዓ are the same sound but in Tigrinya they are distinct.

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Zeerak Talat زیرک طلعت (they/them) @zeerak.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Deadline for applying to SICSS-Edinburgh is coming up soon! The summer school will run from May 26 – June 6. Apply now 👉 sicss.io/2025/edinbur... #SICSS2025 #SICSSEdinburgh

sicss.io

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 15/03/2025

friends, I am preparing an application for Assistant Professor in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) position. if you taught any of my papers in class or used my work to support AI policy/regulation, please let me know or direct me to some sources 🙏🏾🙏🏾

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Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo @chinasa.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Last month, I launched the AI Safety and the Global Majority series at Brookings! I invited contributors from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Oceania, and Southeast Asia to share their perspectives on this topic, and all pieces are now available to read: www.brookings.edu/tags/ai-safe...

brookings.edu

AI Safety and the Global Majority

To globalize perspectives on AI safety, the "AI safety and the global majority" series convenes experts from the Global Majority to counter Western-centric assumptions in AI safety and examine strateg...

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

This is extremely horrifying and awfully similar findings to mine and @rajiinio.bsky.social work on policy-violating videos on YouTube in Amharic. We found that people used appeal to authority as a strategy; posing as medical doctors but in reality posting sexual videos. arxiv.org/abs/2405.16656

arxiv.org

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Made a bet with myself i would submit my FAccT review before getting another email from @abeba.bsky.social. I won 😌

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Can't wait to see the full picture of Samir's work once the dissertation is out!!!

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Looking for an emergency reviewer for a CHI Late Breaking Work submission (8 pages) on Black people's experience with LLMs. Please DM if you have capacity to review! Deadline is on the 14th.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 13/01/2025

"The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence." (1958, The New York Times) hype & false claims around AGI go back as far back as the field itself

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 07/01/2025

We're hoping to organize a hopeful virtual event to get us to think our possible technological futures, and have a creative workshop. Stay tuned. In the mean time, read our Possible Futures Series. If you have thoughts on what you'd like to see from the event, comment below.

Two Black women and a Black man floating in space with planets and other circular objects. The background is purple and their clothing is in yellow and brown.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Giving this talk in about 4 mins! Drop in if you are free and want to hear me rant about why the term "low-resource" is ambiguous and what aspects a language can be "low" in :-)

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