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Uma Gunturi

I work at the intersection of natural language processing, computational social science, and human-centered AI, with a growing interest in cultural analytics. I study narratives in online and offline communities, exploring how they reflect, reinforce, and challenge social and cultural norms, and how language technologies can better interpret them in context. My recent work on counter-storytelling across Reddit communities will appear at EMNLP 2026.

I am an affiliated researcher in the Culture, Language, and Systems (CLS) Lab at CU Boulder, working with Dr. Maria Antoniak. I am also a Machine Learning Engineer at IBM, where I build expressive neural voices for IBM's Text to Speech service. Before that, I worked on IBM Watsonx Orders (formerly McD Tech Labs), building a voice-based conversational agent for McDonald's drive-thrus.

I earned my M.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Eugenia H. Rho in the SAIL Lab, where I wrote my thesis on racial microaggressions on social media. As an undergraduate, I was a research intern at the MIDAS Lab, IIIT Delhi, with Dr. Debanjan Mahata and Dr. Rajiv Ratn Shah.

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On the PhD market I am applying to PhD programs for Fall 2027 in NLP, computational social science, and cultural analytics.

What have I been up to?

  • Sep 2026 Our work on how people challenge racial stereotypes online with counter-stories was accepted as a poster at TADA 2026 (Text as Data) at UC Berkeley on Oct 5! 🐻
  • Aug 2026 Our paper How Do People Challenge Racial Stereotypes Online? Counter-Story Detection has been accepted to EMNLP 2026! 🎉
  • Apr 2026 Our abstract on studying counter narratives in online communities got accepted as a poster! Excited to attend IC2S2 in Vermont! ☀️
  • Dec 2025 New arXiv preprint from my collaboration with the IBM Research Responsible Tech team on human perceptions of AI responses.
  • 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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