Contributed Industry Talks: 

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Let’s Talk, Not Type: An Oral-First Multi-Agent Architecture for Guaraní, Agentic AI Summit 2026, UC Berkeley, AUG 2026 (Upcoming)

• Akshata Kishore Moharir, Ratna Kandala & Niva Manchanda. Breaking the Black Box: How Explainable AI Transforms Digital Safety from Suspicion to Trust. IEEE New Era AI 2025 World Leaders Summit, Seattle, USA, DEC 2025

• From a parched trickle to a stream of faith: Using LLMs to examine influencer-driven persuasion on health benefits of cow urine, Microsoft Research (MSR), Bengaluru, India, JULY 2025

Conference Talks (*Accepted ones were not presented due to visa/funding limitations)

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Let’s Talk, Not Type: An Oral-First Multi-Agent Architecture for Guaraní. ACL 2026 Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP), San Diego, JULY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann. Variety or Specificity? Comparing Emotional Diversity and Granularity in Daily Language, Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, JULY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Ratna Kandala, Niva Manchanda & Akshata Kishore Moharir. The Nonverbal Blind Spot: A Computer Vision Research Agenda for Safer Online Dating. The First Workshop on Humans of Generative AI (HuG), The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026, Denver, Colorado, JUNE 2026 (Upcoming)

• Ratna Kandala, Niva Manchanda & Akshata Kishore Moharir. Beyond the Dominant Gaze: A Computer Vision Research Agenda for Online Dating Safety. Multimodal Alignment for a Pluralistic Society (MAPS) Workshop, The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026, Denver, Colorado, JUNE 2026 (Upcoming)

• Ratna Kandala, Niva Manchanda & Akshata Kishore Moharir. Nonverbal Cues in the Loop: Towards Discomfort Detection and Consent-Aware Design in Video Dating, Women in Computer Vision (WiCV) Workshop, The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026, Denver, Colorado, JUNE 2026 (Upcoming)

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Designing Explainable Conversational Agentic Systems for Guaraní Speakers. Workshop on Large Language Models for Social Reasoning and Simulation (SocialLLM), The 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Los Angeles, California, MAY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Anamta Khan, Ratna Kandala, Deepti, Sheza Munir & Joyojeet Pal. (2026). Milking the Metaphors: Cultural Obfuscation in Wellness (COW) around Gomutra on YouTube using LLMs. Workshop on Large Language Models for Social Reasoning and Simulation (SocialLLM), The 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Los Angeles, California, MAY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Anamta Khan, Ratna Kandala, Deepti, Sheza Munir & Joyojeet Pal. (2026). When Cow Urine Cures Constipation on YouTube: Limits of LLMs in Detecting Culture-specific Health Misinformation. The 2nd Workshop on Misinformation Detection in the Era of LLMs (MisD), The 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Los Angeles, California, MAY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann. For Daily Well-Being, How You Use Emotion Words Matters as Much as How Many. 1st Workshop on Computational Affective Science, The 2026 International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, MAY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. An Oral-first Interactive Agentic System for Guaraní Speakers. Networking Symposium on Latin American NLP (LANLP), The 2026 International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, MAY 2026 (Upcoming)

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Designing Explainable Conversational Agentic Systems for Guaraní Speakers. Texas NLP Symposium, Texas A&M University, Texas, APRIL 2026 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Niva Manchanda. Know the Patient, Not Just the Disease: Modeling Human Mental States Through Graph-Based Relational Reasoning. From Human Cognition to AI Reasoning: Models, Methods, and Applications (HCAIR) Workshop, ICLR, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, APRIL 2026

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Let’s Talk, Not Type: An Oral-First Multi-Agent Architecture for Guaraní, Workshop on Multi-Agent Learning and Its Opportunities in the Era of Generative AI (MALGAI), ICLR, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, APRIL 2026 

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Loneliness as a Case Study for Social Reward Misalignment. ICLR Blog Post Track, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, APRIL 2026

• Anamta Khan, Ratna Kandala, Deepti, Sheza Munir & Joyojeet Pal. Can LLMs assist with qualitative research on culturally nuanced content? A discourse analysis of Indian Gomutra (Cow Urine) influencer content on YouTube. NLP @ Michigan Day, University of Michigan, APRIL 2026 

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. (2026). Designing Explainable Conversational Agentic Systems for Guarani Speakers.  Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) Workshop, CHI 2026, Barcelona, Spain, APRIL 2026 Poster Spotlight 

• Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda & Samantha Adorno. No Man Is an Island: Explainable Graph-LLM Agents for Real-Time Clinical Reasoning, Human-centered Evaluation and Auditing of Language Models Workshop, CHI 2026, Barcelona, Spain, APRIL 2026 

• Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Let’s Talk, Not Type: An Oral-First Multi-Agent Architecture for Guaraní, Co-Designing Equitable and Culturally Grounded Futures workshop, CHI 2026, Barcelona, Spain, APRIL 2026 

• Ratna Kandala &  Akshata Kishore Moharir. How Human-AI Collaboration Illuminates Mental Health Care. Will AI Light Up Human Creativity or Replace It?: Toward Well-Being AI for Co-evolving Human and Machine Intelligence, AAAI 2026 Spring Symposium Series, San Francisco, CA, APRIL 2026 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala &  Akshata Kishore Moharir. Graph Agents: Scaling Responsible Mental Healthcare. AI in Business: Intelligent Transformation and Management, AAAI 2026 Spring Symposium Series, San Francisco, CA, APRIL 2026 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann. Beyond Happy and Sad - Comparing Emotional Diversity and Granularity in Daily Language, 2026 Society for Affective Science (SAS) Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, USA, MARCH 2026

• Niva Manchanda  & Ratna Kandala. Matters of the Heart: Human Perceptions of LLM-Generated Romantic Advice. 2026 Computational Psychology Preconference, Society for Personality and Social Psychologists (SPSP), Chicago, IL, FEB 2026 

• Niva Manchanda  & Ratna Kandala. Matters of the Heart: Human Perceptions of LLM-Generated Romantic Advice. Third International Conference on Love and Relationship Studies Virtual Conference, FEB 2026 (Virtual) (Accepted).

• Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Evaluating Adaptive AI Support: Human Perceptions of LLM-Generated Relationship Advice, Singapore ACM SIGKDD Symposium 2026, Singapore, JAN 2026 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Divya Arvinda Nayak. From Explainability to Action: A Generative Operational Framework for Integrating XAI in Clinical Mental Health Screening, Singapore ACM SIGKDD Symposium 2026, Singapore, JAN 2026 (Accepted)

• Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Evaluating the Impact of LLM Relationship Advice on User Satisfaction and Attitude Change, Bridging AI and Behavior Change (ABC), AAAI 2026, Singapore, JAN 2026 Oral Spotlight 

• Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. Evaluating Adaptive AI Support: Human Perceptions of LLM-Generated Relationship Advice. The 10th Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to Dialog Agents Workshop (LaCATODA), AAAI 2026, Singapore, JAN 2026  (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. Modeling the Semantics of Emotion: A Culturally Grounded Approach to Flemish Narratives. Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meet 2026, New Orleans, USA, JAN 2026 

• Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda & Sunaina Singh. Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation.  IJCNLP-AACL NLP-AI4Health (Integrating NLP and AI for Multilingual and Patient-Centric Healthcare Communication Workshop), IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India, DEC 2025 

• Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda & Sunaina Singh. Bridging Cultural and Clinical Care Gaps in Mental Health through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation,  PReMI’25, IIT Delhi, Delhi, India, DEC 2025 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. LLMs vs. Traditional Sentiment Tools in Psychology: An Evaluation on Belgian-Dutch Narratives. NeurIPS 25 workshop on Evaluating the Evolving LLM Lifecycle - Benchmarks, Emergent Abilities, and Scaling, NeurIPS 2025, San Diego, California, USA, DEC 2025 

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann.  Embedding Emotions: Measuring What Matters in Flemish Daily Stories. Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Workshop, NeurIPS 2025, San Diego, California, USA, DEC 2025 

• Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. From Algorithm to Alliance: A Blueprint for Responsible and Explainable AI in Mental Health Screening. Women in Machine Learning (WiML), NeurIPS 2025, San Diego, California, USA, DEC 2025 

• Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda, Sunaina Singh & Isabel Michel. CL-PDE: A Heterogeneous Graph Framework for Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies. The Centering Low-Resource Languages and Cultures in the Age of Large Language Models (CLRLC-LLMs) Workshop, The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Mexico City, Mexico, DEC 2025 

• Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Isabel Michel & Ratna Kandala. Do LLMs Give Good Romantic Relationship Advice? A Study on User Satisfaction and Attitude Change. First Workshop on LLM Persona Modeling, The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Mexico City, Mexico, DEC 2025 

• Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Divya Nayak. From Explainability to Action: A Generative Operational Framework for Integrating XAI in Clinical Mental Health Screening.  Workshop on Mental Health Disorder Detection on Social Media (MHSM), International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM’25), Washington D.C., USA, NOV 2025 

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. Beyond Co-occurrence: Dynamic Emotion Word Graphs from Contextual Embeddings, Stanford Graph Learning Workshop 2025, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, OCT 2025 

• Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir &  Isabel Michel. Relational AI Agents for Mental Health: A Graph-Enhanced Framework for Responsible Screening and Intervention, Stanford Graph Learning Workshop 2025, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, OCT 2025 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala & Akshata Kishore Moharir. From Algorithm to Alliance: A Blueprint for Responsible and Explainable AI in Mental Health Screening. eXCV Workshop at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA,  OCT 2025 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala & Akshata Kishore Moharir. Toward a Responsible Human-AI Alliance in Mental Health. 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, OCT 2025 (Accepted)

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. The Feelings We Name: Spontaneous Emotion Words as a Window into Daily Well-Being. Social Psychology Prosem Seminar Series, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA, SEP 2025 

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. Using Contextual Embeddings to Map the Rich Topography of Everyday Emotion. Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Symposium, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Vancouver, Canada, JULY 2025 

• Katie Hoemann & Ratna Kandala. Using language to study the ecology of emotion in everyday life, 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC), Buenos Aires, Argentina, JULY 2025 (Accepted)

• Katie Hoemann & Ratna Kandala. Characterizing the breadth and diversity of everyday emotional events. Conference of the Society of Ambulatory Assessment (SAA) 2025, Leuven, Belgium, MAY 2025

• Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. What's Hidden in Flemish Stories: How Can LLMs Unveil the Affective Nuances in Daily Narratives? Poster presented at the New England NLP (NENLP) Meeting 2025, Yale University, New Haven, USA, APRIL 2025

• Ratna Kandala. Comparing Topic Modeling Approaches Using Belgian-Dutch Daily Narratives, BBQ Prosem Seminar Series, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, USA, MARCH 2025

• Katie Hoemann & Ratna Kandala, Toward an Ecology of Emotion in Everyday Life, Society for Affective Science (SAS) Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon, USA, MARCH 2025

• Ratna Kandala. How does our brain juggle free word order in sentence processing? Presented at the Three-Minute Talk as a part of KHOJ24 Research Scholars' Day, IIT Hyderabad, India, FEB 2024

• Ratna Kandala. How does our brain juggle free word order in sentence processing?  Presented at the Five Minute Linguist (5ML) event at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meet 2024, New York City, USA, JAN 2024 Finalist Link

• Ratna Kandala. On the Implementation of the Algorithm for Representation of Discontinuity in Natural Language. Inter-IIT Tech Meet, IIT Madras, India, DEC 2023 (Paper Presented in Absentia by Harsh Goyal)

• Ratna Kandala & Prakash Mondal. On the Implementation of the Algorithm for Representation of Discontinuity in Natural Language. 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICNLP), Guangzhou, China, MAR 2023 Best Presentation Award

• Ratna Kandala & Prakash Mondal. The Representation of Discontinuity and the Correspondence Principle. 36th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC36), Manila, Philippines, OCT 2022 (Online)

• Ratna Kandala. Choice of Discipline and English Language Proficiency Levels. National Seminar on Innovative Practices and Research in the Era of Digi Education, University of Hyderabad, India, MAR 2019 

• Ratna Kandala. Academic Background, Language Proficiency and Choice of Discipline: An Exploration. National Seminar on Interfaces in English Language Studies: Research and Practice, University of Hyderabad, India, FEB 2019 

• Ratna Kandala. Modeling the Mushroom Body Circuitry to understand the role of feedback mechanisms from the alpha and beta lobes to the calyx. Graduate Research Seminar, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, India, MAY 2017

• Ratna Kandala & Ankit Kumar. Memory Retrieval by Activating Engram Cells in Mouse Models of Early Alzheimer’s disease. Poster presented at the GIAN Workshop on Ionic Signaling, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, India, JULY 2016 Second Best Poster Award