About
A bit about me
Hello! I'm Maria Belen, or Belu. I'm proudly marrona, a curious nerd, a first generation scholar, and a Quechua Aymara descendant. I try to stay aware of my privileges, share what I learn, and help make opportunities and knowledge more accessible. I care about concrete action, thoughtful collaboration, and working with reflective people who care deeply about what they do.
Profile
Previously at Microsoft Medallia FLAIR
I'm a PhD student at George Mason University, advised by Antonis Anastasopoulos in the GMU NLP Lab and supported by NSF LT4CPR. My research examines how language and speech technologies support communication during humanitarian crises, especially for underserved languages. My ISCRAM work found that language models can underestimate urgency outside English. I now use interviews, mixed methods, and community centered data collection to study safer AI systems and human AI collaboration in practice. This work includes a collaboration with the humanitarian language nonprofit CLEAR Global.
- Workshop organizer, LT4CPR@AACL-IJCNLP and ISCRAM 2026; NAACL 2027 SRW cochair
- Invited speaker at UNESCO's International Translation Day and the Indigenous Digital Activism Summit (Global Voices)
- Speaker and panelist at the Indigenous in AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2024 and 2025
- Published at COLING 2025, AmericasNLP@NAACL 2025, ISCRAM 2026, and SpeechAI@CHI 2026
- Lacuna Fund NLP grant recipient for work on indigenous languages
- Advisory Committee for the Mozilla Common Voice Spontaneous Speech ASR Shared Task
Previously, I earned my Computer Science degree at the University of Buenos Aires, working on CS educational tools, applied ML in chemistry, and the state of Indigenous languages in Argentina.
News
- 2027
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Coming in 2027
- Co-chairing the Student Research Workshop (SRW) at NAACL 2027! Really excited to connect with and support student researchers from across the Americas, and especially to see more student research from Latin America represented!
- 2026
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Coming in September
- Heading to Pittsburgh to present Communication as the Foundation of Human-AI Teamwork in Humanitarian Response at CMU's Human-AI Complementarity Workshop, and excited to discuss communication and teamwork in high-stakes settings!
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Coming in November
- Co-organizing the LT4CPR workshop at AACL-IJCNLP 2026 🇨🇳! Especially excited to bring together researchers, practitioners, and NGOs, and to grow an interinstitutional community using AI for humanitarian and disaster response.
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July
- We co-organized a roundtable with Genner and Manuel at NAISA 2026 🇨🇱 on "Inteligencia Artificial" vista, interpelada y reconstruida desde Abiayala.
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June
- June was busy in the best way! Will Lewis and I co-organized the Voices Across Crises: Stakeholder Perspectives and Opportunities for AI Speech Technologies workshop at ISCRAM 2026 in The Hague, where my paper was also accepted as a WiP.
- Also got to present at the Sunawi Workshop at Loyola Marymount University and talk about a question I care deeply about: Between the Academy and the Community: Are Our Contributions Doing What We Think They Are?
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May
- Had a great time giving an invited lecture for the Language Technologies for Crises course at the University of Washington!
- Really excited to be part of our Benchmark Validity paper, accepted at the CTB Workshop@ICML 2026! The questions it raises feel especially important when AI serves communities in non-Western regions and other high-stakes settings.
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April
- Got to give an AI Literacy seminar for Maya speakers through a collaboration with Global Voices, a really meaningful experience!
- Best Poster Award at MASC-ALL for our Pilot Study work!
- First time attending CHI! I presented a poster of our position paper at the SpeechAI4All Workshop@CHI2026 and gave a Lightning Talk at the Global Science Program@CHI2026!
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Feb
- Two new preprints are out! 📝
- Thrilled to be selected for the 2026 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop in Seattle. Big thanks to the GMU CS Department for the support!
- 2025
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Dec
- Finished my breadth requirement/mandatory courses! 🎉
- I was invited to be a student panelist at the Indigenous in AI workshop, NeurIPS2025.
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Oct
- I'm in the Advisory Committee for the Mozilla Common Voice Spontaneous Speech ASR - ST.
- I was an invited speaker at the International Translation Day'25, organized by UNESCO and Translation Commons.
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Sep
- I'm giving a seminar at the "Jornadas de Jóvenes Linguistas", Fac. de Filosofia y Letras, University of Buenos Aires.
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Aug
- I'm attending ACL at Vienna to host a BoF on LTs for Crisis Response.
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May
- Our Lacuna Fund NLP grant proposal got awarded!!
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Apr
- Submission to the Machine Translation Metric Shared Task at AmericasNLP@NAACL.
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Mar
- I'm attending MASC-SLL at Penn State to present our MT Crisis Cookbook.
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Feb
- I'm an invited lecturer at the Indigenous Digital Activism Summit, organized by Global Voices (Mexico).
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Jan
- I'm running at COLING2025 a BoF about languages technologies for crisis response and preparedness. Join us!
- Our Survey on Indigenous Languages spoken in Argentina got accepted to COLING 2025!
- 2024
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Dec
- I'll be speaker at the Indigenous in AI Workshop@NeurIPS2024 with my FLAIR folks!
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Nov
- My first grant proposal got to the final round. Fingers crossed!
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Sep
- Participated in the Female Researchers Workshop at Interspeech2024
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Aug
- Moved to Virginia (USA) to start my PhD at George Mason University!
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Jul
- I interned at FLAIR, the First Languages AI Reality Initiative!
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Jun
- 1st time attending a top-tier conference! Presented our ongoing survey on indigenous languages spoken in Arg. at the LatinX Workshop@NAACL2024
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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 financial support!)
