Dr Hellina Hailu Nigatu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab (AIAL) in ADAPT at Trinity College Dublin, has received the 2026 Wangari Maathai Impact Award at the Deep Learning Indaba conference in Lagos, Nigeria.
The award, presented on the 3rd August 2026, recognises and celebrates work by African innovators, thinkers, and advocates who demonstrate impactful work, including, but not limited to, technical, societal, environmental, and economic domains, around machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Hellina was recognised for a year-long research and mentorship programme that supported MSc and BSc students from Ethiopia investigating gender bias in machine translation datasets for low-web data languages. The project resulted in two research publications, as well as publicly released datasets, models and evaluation frameworks.
The project’s main paper, Evaluating Machine Translation Datasets for Low-Web Data Languages: A Gendered Lens, was published in the findings of ACL 2026. Github available here.
