Ismini Lourentzou

Ismini Lourentzou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's School of Information Sciences, leading the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab. Her research focuses on multimodal machine learning, vision-language models, and human-centric embodied AI systems.

• School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Former Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science (2021-2023)

Research Interests:

• Multimodal learning with limited supervision
• Interactive AI agents and human-agent communication
• Vision-language navigation and task-driven conversational systems
• Self-supervised learning and grounding vision-language models
• Applications in healthcare, misinformation detection, and manufacturing

Scientific Contributions:

• Recipient of DARPA, NSF, and Amazon funding
• Developed frameworks for vision-language co-segmentation and embodied navigation
• Keynote speaker at ACM PETRA 2022 on supervision signals in healthcare AI

Awards & Recognitions:

• Best Vice Co-Chair at IEEE BigData 2023
• Outstanding New Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech
• IBM Invention Plateau Award (2019)