Ismini Lourentzou

Learning with limited imperfect supervision, multimodal machine learning, vision-language models, and their applications to healthcare, language-driven embodied reasoning, and other fields.

• Best Vice Co-Chair, IEEE BigData 2023
• Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award, College of Engineering | Virginia Tech, 2023
• Outstanding Reviewer, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks 2022
• Outstanding Reviewer, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020
• IBM Invention Plateau Award, IBM Research, 2019
• Rising Stars in EECS 2019

Ismini Lourentzou is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she leads the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab. Her research focus is multimodal machine learning, primarily the intersection of vision and language in settings with limited supervision, and its applications in healthcare, embodied AI, and other fields. She has served on the NeurIPS'23 and NeurIPS'22 organizing committees, as co-organizer for the NeurIPS'22 Gaze Meets ML workshop, and in editorial and area chair roles for PLOS Digital Health, ECCV, ACL, IEEE BigData and MICCAI. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), and Amazon. Lourentzou earned her PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before joining iSchool, she was an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, Computer Science Department and core faculty member of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Discovery Analytics. 

• Spring 2025 - Appd Machine Learn: Team Proj - IS557AC

For a complete list of publications, visit Ismini Lourentzou's Google Scholar page.

Muntasir Wahed, Xiaona Zhou, Tianjiao Yu, and Ismini Lourentzou. Fine-Grained Alignment for Cross-Modal Recipe Retrieval, IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2024

Meghana Holla and Ismini Lourentzou. Commonsense-driven Zero-Shot Language Video Moment Retrieval. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2024

Amarachi B Mbakwe, Ismini Lourentzou, Leo Anthony Celi, Oren J Mechanic, and Alon Dagan. ChatGPT passing USMLE shines a spotlight on the flaws of medical education. PLOS Digital Health Editorial, 2023.

Amarachi B Mbakwe, Lyuyang Wang, Mehdi Moradi, and Ismini Lourentzou. Hierarchical vision transformers for disease progression detection in chest x-ray images. International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023

Curious ConversationsPodcast Episode on AI Personal Assistants, November 2023

UMass CIIR Series Invited Talk on Robust Visual Understanding with Limited Supervision, March 2023.

Critical Care Data Analysis Summit Invited Talk on Multimodal Explainable AI Models for Clinical Reasoning, November 2022.

ACM PETRA 2022 Keynote on Supervision Signals for Machine Learning in Healthcare and Beyond, July 2022.