CV

Education

• Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Florida, 2028 (expected)
• B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics, University of Florida, 2023
• A.A. in General Studies, Florida Gateway College, 2019

Work experience

• Summer 2024 - Present: Research Assistant @ UF Data Studio
  • University of Florida CISE Dept.
  • Duties include: Bechmarking VLM Models, Prompt Engineering, Multimodal Machine Translation, Dataset Curation, Writing Academic Papers, Visual Parsing, Parsing with ANTLR, DSL Design
  • Supervisor: Dr. Christan Earl Grant
• Summer 2023 - Summer 2024: Research Assistant @ ELX Lab
  • University of Florida CISE Dept.
  • Duties included: Web Design, Data Visualization Design, UX Design, Conducting User Studies, Linux Web Sever Management, Interfacing with IRB, Flask Server Management.
  • Supervisor: Dr. Sharon Lynn Chu
• Spring 2021 - Summer 2024: Teaching Assistant
  • University of Florida
  • Duties included: Designing Exam Questions, Debugging Student Code, Teaching Discussion Groups, Advising Students in Software Engineering Projects, Investigating Plagiarism, Grading Exams,
  • Supervisors: Dr. Cheryl Resch, Dr. Pete Dobbins, Dr. Beverly Sanders, Dr. Jason Harrington

Selected Publications

• C. Driggers-Ellis, G. Ayoubi, and C. Grant, “OPTiCAL: An Abstract Positional Reasoning Benchmark for Vision Language Models”, in 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, 2025.
• A. Dhawan, C. Driggers-Ellis, C. Grant, D. Z. Wang, “Improving Indigenous Language Machine Translation with Synthetic Data and Language-Specific Preprocessing”, in Proceedings of the LoResMT Workshop 2026, 2026.
• C. Driggers-Ellis, G. Ayoubi, G. Salunke, and C. Grant, “Formal Machine Interpretation for the Semasiographic Mixtec Codices of Precolonial and Early Colonial Mesoamerica,” in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR), 2026.
• A. Dhawan, C. Driggers-Ellis, D. Kasinets, C. Grant, D. Z. Wang, “Retrieval-Augmented Long-Context Translation for Cultural Image Captioning: Gators submission for AmericasNLP 2026 shared task” in Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), 2026.

Skills

• Machine Learning
  • LLMs
  • VLMs
  • Reasoning Benchmarks
• Computer Vision
  • Image Segmentation
  • Obect Detection
  • Parsing Pictographic Manuscipts
  • Computer Vision Metrics
• Programming Language Design
  • ANTLR4
  • Context Free Grammar Design

Leadership

• Co-Chair of the HCDS seminar committee.
• Previously a Peer Mentor in the SOCIAL Gators group for students at UF with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).