Headshot of Elisa, a white woman in her late twenties with shoulder-long straight blond hair, delicate gold jewelry and large thin-gold glasses. She is smiling into the camera. The background is blurred but greenery and a building is visible.

Elisa Kreiss

Elisa Kreiss is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UCLA and the lab director of the Coalas (Computation and Language for Society) Lab. Previously, she completed a PhD in Linguistics at Stanford, advised by Christopher Potts, where she was a member of Stanford’s NLP group and the Stanford Data Science Center for Open and REproducible Science (CORES).

Elisa investigates how we produce and understand language situated in the visual world. Her work combines tools from natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and human-computer interaction to advance our understanding of how communicative context shapes language use. Her research has direct applications to image accessibility – the challenge of (automatically) generating image descriptions for blind and low vision users.

Elisa’s work has been supported by several Google Research Awards, the National Science Foundation, Stanford’s Human-centered AI initiative, and Stanford’s Accelerator for Learning. She is an advocate for diverse, inclusive and supportive learning and working environments, and she is the recipient of Stanford’s Community Impact Award (2022).

Find out more: CV (last update: February 2024), Google Scholar, Twitter.

Are you interested in her work or in joining the Coalas Lab? Learn more here!