Nuredin Ali

PhD student
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
E-Mail: ali00530 at umn dot edu

CV



ABOUT ME

Hi there! I am a PhD candidate at the Universiy of Minnesota advised by Stevie Chancellor part of the Grouplens lab. My interest broadly lies at the intersection of Machine Learning and Human Computer Interaction. Particularly, I have been focusing on social media and mental health. How we can identify high risk behavior from social media data using machine learning techniques. The mental health and wellbeing of the data workers contracted to clean graphic content from social media.

I also work closely with Timnit Gebru, Zeerak Talat, Milagros Miceli, Dylan Baker, Alex Hanna, and others at DAIR on understanding the impact of social media in affected communities and mental health of data workers.

Proir to this I completed my undergraduate studies in Information Systems at Mekelle University by 2020. I was co-organising the Development working group at Machanism Design for Social Good.

In my free time I love playing and also watch European football (soccer).

UPDATES

  • Publication (Apr 2026): Our paper on Privacy Preserving Approaches (Federated Learning and Differential Privacy) for Mental Health Detection got accepted to ACL 2026 Main Conference with recommendation of being on top 15% of accepted papers and Oral presentation. [Pre-print]. See you in San Diego in July!
  • Press (Feb, March 2026): Our recent work on the mental health crisis of content moderators has been featured by TIME and referenced in The Guardian article on Data Workers.
  • Publication (Feb 2026): Two of our works were accepted to CHI 2026. The work I led titled "Beyond Content Exposure: Systemic Factors Driving Moderators’ Mental Health Crisis in Africa" is accepted to CHI 2026. [Read the paper]
  • Press (Jan 2026): My Piece for Data and Society titled "How Tech Platforms Fail to Protect Societies in Conflict Regions" is out now. [Read the piece]
  • Press (Dec 2025): Nyalleng Moorosi mentions our work in relation to failures of developing AI systems in African languages at CNN "Africa has thousands of languages. Can AI be trained on all of them?" [Article Link]
  • Press (July 2025): I was quoted in Africa in Fact article - Article Link
  • Press (May 2025): I had a discussion with Tighat Forum about our The Role of Expertise paper [Interview Video]
  • Press (May 2025): Our work on the Role of Expertise was covered in multiple news outlets, including Compiler News, Tech Policy Press, Addis Standard, and others. - See them all here - Tigray Genocide and Social Media.
  • Press (Oct 2024): I did a long interview with Voice of America (VOA) Tigrinya. Talking about Mental Health and Harmful Content on Social Media in my native language Tigrinya. [interview video]
  • Travel (May 2024): I'll be at FAccT24 in Rio to organize a CRAFT session and Mexico City for NAACL24 to present a paper
  • Publication (Apr 2024): Our Paper on Cross Cultural Mental Health Model Generalization got accepted to NAACL 2024 Main Conference.

PUBLICATIONS


  • FedMental: Evaluating Federated Learningfor Mental Health Detection from Social Media Data,
    Accepted at The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026). Main Conference. Oral Presentation.,
    Nuredin Ali, Anjali Ratnam, Zeerak Talat, Stevie Chancellor
    [Pre-print]

  • Beyond Content Exposure: Systemic Factors Driving Moderators’ Mental Health Crisis in Africa,
    Accepted at 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI),
    Nuredin Ali, Tianling Yang, Shivani Kapania, Kauna Malgwi, Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan, Adio-Adet Dinka, Elaine O.Nsoesie, Milagros Miceli, Stevie Chancellor
    [paper]

  • ‘The plan is just survival’: Data Work in Kenya and the Regime of Entrapment,
    Accepted at 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI),
    Shivani Kapania, Tianling Yang, Nuredin Ali, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Milagros Miceli, Alex Taylor, Sarah Fox
    [paper]

  • Into the Void: Understanding Online Health Information in Low-Web Data Languages,
    Accepted at 2025 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES),
    Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Nuredin Ali, Fiker Tewelde, Stevie Chancellor, Daricia Wilkinson
    [paper]

  • Secondary Stakeholders in AI: Fighting for, Brokering, and Navigating Agency,
    Accepted at 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,
    Leah Hope Ajmani, Nuredin Ali, Stevie Chancellor
    [paper]

  • The Role of Expertise in Effectively Moderating Harmful Social Media Content,
    Accepted at 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
    Nuredin Ali, Tianling Yang, Shivani Kapania, Meron Estefanos, Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan, Zecharias Zelalem, Messai Ali, Rishan Berhe, Dylan Baker, Zeerak Talat, Milagros Miceli, Alex Hanna, Timnit Gebru
    [paper] [open access]

  • Diverse Perspectives, Divergent Models: Cross-Cultural Evaluation of Depression Detection on Twitter,
    Accepted at NAACL 2024 Main Conference,
    Nuredin Ali, Charles Chuankai Zhang, Ned Mayo, Stevie Chancello
    [paper]

  • Error Analysis of Tigrinya English Machine Translation Systems,
    Presented at ICLR 2023 on AfricaNLP workshop,
    (Equal Contribution*) Negasi Hale*, Nuredin Ali*, Asmelash Teka Hadgu
    [Preprint]

  • Machine Learning Models Evaluation and Feature Importance Analysis on Non Performing Loans,
    NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Machine Learning for Development (ML4D),
    (Equal Contribution*) Rufael Fekadu*, Anteneh Getachew*, Yishak Tadele*, Nuredin Ali*, Israel Goytom
    [arxiv]

  • Banknote Recognition for the visually impaired (Case of Ethiopian note),
    NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Machine Learning for Development (ML4D),
    Nuredin Ali
    [arxiv]

  • Exploring Transfer Learning on Face Recognition of Dark Skinned, Low Quality and Low Resource Face Data,
    NeurIPS 2020 at Black in AI Workshop,
    Nuredin Ali
    [arxiv]

Service

  • Deep Learning Indaba (DLI), Proposal Reviewer: 2026
  • ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), Reviewer: 2025
  • ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Reviewer: 2025, 2026
  • International Conference on Web abd Social Media (ICWSM), Reviewer: 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026
  • NeurIPS Ethics. Reviewer: 2024, 2025
  • ICLR 2023 Tiny Papers a DEI initiative, Area Chair: 2023, 2024
  • Development Work Group at Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG). Co-organizer: Spring 2023
  • ICLR AfricaNLP Workshop. Reviewer: 2023
  • ICLR Machine Learning for Global Health (MLGH) Workshop. Reviewer: 2023

Last Updated: April 11, 2026