About
What you should know about me?
Hello there! I'm Maria Belen but everyone knows me as Belu. I'm proudly marrona("brown"), nerd, first-gen and Quechua-Aymara descendant. I try to be aware of my privileges, I'm always glad to share my learnings -specially for those who don't have the opportunities I do- and learn with others. I believe in concrete actions and real results. I love working with reflective and introspective colleges, who are passionate about what they do.
Profile
I'm a 2nd year PhD student at George Mason University, where I work with Antonis Anastasopoulos at the GMU NLP Lab.
Currently, my research interests include:
- LTs for Crisis Preparedness and Response
- HCI + NLP & Speech, LTs for Underserved Languages
- Meta-Research (Science of Science)
Previously, I studied Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires, working on CS educational tools, applied ML in chemistry and understanding the state of Argentinian indigenous languages. I've also interned at Medallia and Microsoft as a Data Scientist, and at the First Languages AI Reality.
News
- Coming in May: I'm co-organizing with Will Lewis the Voices Across Crises: Stakeholder Perspectives and Opportunities for AI Speech Technologies workshop at ISCRAM 2026, where my paper was also accepted as a WiP. See you at The Hague!
- Coming in May: I'm giving an invited lecture for the course on Language Technologies for Crises at University of Washington (UW).
- April: I'm giving a seminar on AI Literacy for Maya speakers as part of a collaboration with Global Voices.
- April: I won the Best Poster Award at MASC-ALL for our Pilot Study work! 🥇
- April: Presenting a poster of our position paper at the SpeechAI4All Workshop@CHI2026, and giving a Lightning Talk at the Global Science Program@CHI2026.
- Feb: Released two new preprints 📝:
- Feb: I got selected to attend the 2026 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop in Seattle. Thanks to the CS GMU Department for their support!
- 2025
- Dec: Finished my breath requeriment/mandatory courses! 🎉
- Dec: I was invited to be a student panelist at the Indigenous in AI workshop, NeurIPS2025.
- Oct: I'm in the Advisory Commitee for the Mozilla Common Voice Spontaneous Speech ASR - ST.
- Oct: I was an invited speaker at the International Translation Day'25, organized by UNESCO and Translation Commons.
- Sep: I'm giving a seminar at the "Jornadas de Jóvenes Linguistas", Fac. de Filosofia y Letras, University of Buenos Aires.
- Aug: I'm attending ACL at Vienna to host a BoF on LTs for Crisis Response.
- May: Our Lacuna Fund NLP grant proposal got awarded!!
- Apr: Submission to the Machine Translation Metric Shared Task at AmericasNLP@NAACL.
- Mar: I'm attending MASC-SLL at Penn State to present our MT Crisis Cookbook.
- Feb: I'm an invited lecture at the Indigenous Digital Activism Summit, organized by Global Voices (Mexico).
- Jan: I'm running at COLING2025 a BoF about languages technologies for crisis response and preparedness. Join us!
- Jan: Our Survey on Indigenous Languages spoken in Argentina got accepted to COLING 2025!
- 2024
- Dec: I'll be speaker at the Indigenous in AI Workshop@NeurIPS2024 with my FLAIR folks!
- Nov: My first grant proposal got to the final round. Fingers crossed!
- Sep: Participated in the Female Researchers Workshop at Interspeech2024
- Aug: Moved to Virginia (USA) to start my PhD at George Mason University!
- Jul: I interned at FLAIR, the First Languages AI Reality Initiative!
- Jun: 1st time attending a top-tier conference! Presented our ongoing survey on indigenous languages spoken in Arg. at the LatinX Workshop@NAACL2024
- Apr: I was NOT selected for the 2 fellowships I applied for :( (but I got offers to pursue my grad program :D -- thanks to Women in ML for their finantial support!)
