Adriana Kovashka

Adriana Kovashka is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, affiliated with the School of Computing and Information and serving as Department Chair. Her academic journey began with BA degrees in Computer Science and Media Studies from Pomona College (2008) and a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin (2014).

• Joined Pitt’s faculty in January 2015
• NSF CAREER awardee (2021)
• Google Faculty Research Award recipient

Dr. Kovashka’s research spans Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, focusing on visual rhetoric, weak multimodal supervision, and domain adaptation. She pioneered techniques for analyzing political imagery, developing robust object detection frameworks, and exploring the intersection of visual and textual persuasion through large-scale annotated datasets.

Her recent work emphasizes geographic diversity in vision-language systems, audio-visual fusion for domain generalization, and shape-texture bias mitigation in CNNs. Key publications include groundbreaking studies on symbolic reasoning, multimodal dialogue systems, and ethical AI applications in education.

Scientific honors include:

• NSF CRII Award (2016)
• NSF CAREER Award (2021)
• Pitt CRDF Award (2016, 2018)
• Best Paper at ECV Workshop (2021)
• Google Faculty Research Award (2016, 2018)

Dr. Kovashka actively mentors students in multimodal learning projects and collaborates with interdisciplinary teams on NSF-funded initiatives. She co-organizes workshops like the first CVPR workshop on advertisement understanding and leads research groups exploring human-AI co-learning systems.