Heading to ACL 2026 in San Diego ☀️
I am heading to San Diego, CA for the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), July 7–12, 2026!
This year I’ll be wearing several hats:
🎤 Presenting DIA-HARM (Main Conference)
DIA-HARM: Dialectal Disparities in Harmful Content Detection across 50 English Dialects — the first benchmark for evaluating disinformation detection robustness across 50 English dialects spanning U.S., British, African, Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific varieties. Details →
📋 Area Chair
Serving as an Area Chair for the Main Conference — coordinating reviews and meta-reviews in my assigned track. More →
🤝 Open to chat
If you’ll be at ACL 2026 and want to talk about:
- Multilingual NLP, dialectal robustness, or low-resource AI
- AI safety, adversarial ML, or content moderation equity
- Joining the Secure and Ethical AI Lab (SEAL) at CU Boulder as a Ph.D. student, postdoc, or undergraduate researcher
- Caribbean and African diaspora language technologies
- Just to say hi
…please reach out! Email or DM me on X/Twitter. I’d love to connect.
See you in San Diego! 🌊
I completed my Ph.D. in Informatics at Penn State University (defended May 2026; formal conferral August 2026), where I conducted research at the PIKE Research Lab under Dr. Dongwon Lee and the College of IST. Starting August 2026, I will join the Department of Information Science at the College of Media, Communication and Information (CMDI), University of Colorado Boulder, as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor and founding Director of the Secure and Ethical AI Lab (SEAL). My research advances trustworthy and equitable AI for the world’s languages and communities — spanning multilingual NLP, low-resource and dialectal language technology, AI safety, and information integrity, with work extending across 70+ languages. I have authored 14+ peer-reviewed papers with 315+ citations in premier venues including ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, KDD, and IEEE.
My doctoral research focuses on bridging the digital language divide through transfer learning, classification (NLU), generation (NLG), adversarial attacks, and developing end-to-end AI pipelines using RAG and Agentic AI workflows for combating multilingual threats. Drawing from my Grenadian background and knowledge of local Creole languages, I bring a global perspective to AI challenges, working to democratize state-of-the-art AI capabilities for underserved linguistic communities worldwide. My mission is to develop robust multilingual multimodal systems and mitigate evolving security vulnerabilities while enhancing access to human language technology through cutting-edge solutions.
As an NSF LinDiv Fellow, I conduct transdisciplinary research advancing human-AI language interaction for social good. I actively mentor 5+ research interns and teach Applied Generative AI courses. Through industry experience at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Interaction LLC, and Coalfire, I bridge academic research with practical applications in combating evolving security threats and enhancing global AI accessibility. I see multilingual advances and interdisciplinary collaboration as a competitive advantage, not a communication challenge. Beyond research, I stay active through dance, fitness, martial arts, and community service.