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Uma Gunturi

I am currently a Machine Learning Engineer in IBM Watsonx Assistant working on expressive neural voices for our Text to Speech service. You can check out some of the voices I helped build here. Previously, I worked on the IBM Watsonx Orders (formerly McD Tech Labs) project, building a voice-based conversational agent for McDonald's drive-thrus in Mountain View, CA. I earned my Masters in Computer Science from Virginia Tech , where I wrote a thesis on Linguistically Differentiating Acts and Recalls of Racial Microaggressions. I was a part of Dr. Eugenia H. Rho's SAIL Research Lab. I was also a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI) at VT. I received my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering in 2021 at Bennett University, India.

During my undergrad, I was a Research Intern at MIDAS Lab at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi working under the mentorship of Dr. Debanjan Mahata and Dr. Rajiv Ratn Shah. My research focuses on NLP and Computational Social Science, and more recently, Cultural Analytics.

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What have I been up to?

  • Jul 2025 Excited to share that our paper CounterQuill—a human-AI collaborative counterspeech writing system—has been accepted to IEEE VL/HCC 2025!
  • Nov 2024 Checkout our latest work on building real-time, edge-efficient multi-intent translation systems for drive-thru ordering at IBM Watsonx Orders, now available as an arXiv preprint!
  • Nov 2024 Excited to attend CSCW 2024 in Costa Rica 🦥🇨🇷, also our work received Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Recognition Award!
  • Jan 2024 Paper accepted at ACM CHI 2024!
  • Sept 2023 Paper on my thesis work has been accepted at ACM CSCW 2024!
  • Jul 2023 Excited to join IBM Watson Orders (formerly McD Tech Labs) as an ML Engineer in Mountain View, CA!🍟
  • Apr 2023 Received the Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Award 2023 for my M.S thesis at Virginia Tech!🏆
  • Mar 2023 Paper accepted at CHI 2023 Workshop on Combating Toxicity, Harassment, and Abuse in Online Social Spaces! [Demo]
  • Aug 2022 Attended the IBM Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School 2022!
  • May 2022 Excited to start my Summer Internship at IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY!
  • Nov 2021 Paper accepted at EMNLP 2021! [Data & Models]
  • Aug 2021 Joined Virginia Tech as a graduate student!

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