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

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

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

My work has been supported by a Google Research Award, Stanford’s Human-centered AI initiative, and Stanford’s Accelerator for Learning. I’m an advocate for diverse, inclusive and supportive learning and working environments, and I’m the recipient of Stanford’s Community Impact Award (2022).

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

Are you interested in my work or in joining the Coalas Lab?
Reach out to me: ekreiss@ucla.edu