The ongoing war in Ukraine has severely disrupted the lives of millions of people, significantly impacting university students by displacing many and interrupting their education. In response, NYU R/AI launched #RAIforUkraine, a fully remote academic research program in partnership with the Center for Data, AI & Society at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv, Ukraine. In the short term, the program aims to provide students in Ukraine with a sense of normalcy and access to high-quality research opportunities. Its long-term goal is to strengthen Ukraine’s research capacity in responsible AI.

#RAIforUkraine launched in June 2022 and has been running on the academic calendar (September-August) since Fall 2023. The program is open to undergraduate and graduate students living in Ukraine and enrolled in computer science, information systems, and related fields at accredited Ukrainian universities. RAI Research Fellows conduct collaborative research on responsible AI under the guidance of mentors at U.S. and European academic institutions. Fellows receive academic credit, with research stipends available to support selected projects.

Download the RAI for Ukraine flyer for a summary of the program!


Program Showcases

RAI Resarch Fellows present their findings in public virtual showcases. Many of their projects lead to peer-reviewed publications at top conferences and journals.


Why Join #RAIforUkraine?

Since 2022, our program has supported 141 Research Fellows from 19 Ukrainian universities (including 40 new recruits in the Fall 2025 cohort). Guided by 80+ mentors, ranging from faculty to PhD students and postdocs at 40 academic institutions across 13 countries, our Fellows have participated in over 60 research projects, leading to 24 peer-reviewed publications to date, with several more in the pipeline. As the program continues to grow, so do its achievements, strengthening international research collaborations and supporting the next generation of Ukrainian researchers.

For Prospective Research Fellows
  • Gain research experience: You will work on a RAI research project of your choice, under the guidance of distinguished faculty from universities across the U.S. and Europe, and in close collaboration with their doctoral students or postdocs.

  • Build your resume: You will receive an affiliation as a Research Fellow at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, enhancing your academic profile with international credibility.

  • Receive academic credit / stipend: You will receive academic credit towards your degree in the Fall semester; and a competitive stipend if you are selected to continue in the Spring and Summer terms.

  • Establish global collaborations: You will collaborate with peers from diverse backgrounds, gaining valuable international perspectives and cultural insights.

“This program had a great balance between practical and theory based learning. We spoke a lot about ethics, general fairness, philosophy and sociology. But it was also practical because we were looking at data based on everything we had discussed.” A. Holovenko, 2022 RAI Research Fellow, graduate student at Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU)
"I met new people and I had never worked in this field and it was new to me. I got to learn what its about and we read others papers. Previously, I only had exposure to Machine Learning research, but this time I got to read papers on sociology which gave me a new perspective because I had no idea about it before. Just learnt a bunch of new things I had never tried or experienced." A. Standnik, 2022 RAI Research Fellow, undergraduate student, UCU
"For me, this internship was an invaluable opportunity to learn new concepts 'on the job.' I particularly appreciated its structured approach, which included both hands-on projects and weekly lectures covering various topics in Responsible AI." D. Herasymuk, 2023 RAI Research Fellow, graduate student, UCU
"This program is extremely interesting and allowed me to meet incredible people with whom we wrote a paper and present it at FAccT 2023. Also, we continue to work on further research. This program introduced me to the area of Responsible AI, which formed the basis of my master's thesis and made me interested in continuing this topic in PhD." N. Drushchak, 2023 RAI Research Fellow, graduate student, UCU
"I would like to thank the organizers and mentors for the opportunity to learn research. High-level organization, program structure, and constant support from mentors are three key factors that allowed me to improve myself. This program is a great example of such high-quality research training. The experience has definitely helped me understand the essence of research and has been imprinted on me for years." D. Orel, 2023 RAI Research Fellow, graduate student, NaUKMA
"This collaboration gave me an opportunity to write an "A" bachelor's thesis, and I was able to implement my research for a practical application in a company called RelationalAI, where I got the Research Intern position. Overall, the program gave me great connections and an opportunity to bring my ideas into reality. My mentors helped me at every step of that journey, and none of this would’ve been possible without the NYU R/AI." M. Bondarenko, 2023 RAI Research Fellow, graduate student, UCU
"RAI Research Program turned my 3rd year at UCU into an incredible journey in an academic environment! Throughout the year, I’ve gained hands-on experience in going from an abstract idea to a prototype, iteratively refining it, and finally wrapping up the results concisely. This was very different from my previous experience and taught me to think out of the box and be brave with my ideas! The program is a great opportunity for young students to try themselves in real high-quality research, which is incredibly important for Ukrainian academia." R. Mutel, 2023 RAI Research Fellow, undergraduate student, UCU

For Prospective Mentors
  • Support Ukraine: You will support Ukrainian students during critical times, helping maintain and elevate educational standards.

  • Establish global collaborations: You will engage in cutting-edge research with motivated and talented students, leading to potential co-authored publications. These students will receive academic credit and competitive stipends, with funding provided by NYU R/AI.

  • Enhance your mentorship skills: You will enhance your mentorship skills by guiding students through collaborative research projects, and receive acknowledgement for your mentorship efforts, bolstering your academic and professional profile.

  • Participate in cultural exchange: You will gain insights into diverse cultural perspectives, enhancing your global understanding and intercultural skills.


For Prospective Donors
  • Support Ukraine: You will leave a lasting impact on the educational landscape in Ukraine by empowering and supporting the next generation of scholars during a critical time.

  • Build a better future: You will contribute to the development of responsible AI principles and practices that will shape the future of technology and society. Your contribution will help make “responsible AI” synonymous with “AI”.

  • Strengthen international collaboration: You will support a unique program that bridges cultural and geographical gaps, promoting peace and cooperation between nations. By doing so, you will help create a diverse, international research community, fostering cross-cultural understanding and collaboration.

Click here to support #RAIforUkraine. We greatly appreciate your generosity and commitment to empowering the next generation of Ukrainian scholars!

Selected Publications

  1. Seasoning Data Modeling Education with GARLIC: A Participatory Co-Design Framework
    Viktoriia Makovska, Ihor Michurin, Mariia Tokhtamysh, George Fletcher, and Julia Stoyanovich
    Proceedings of the DataEd Workshop, co-located with EDBT/ICDT 2026
  2. Memory Undone: Between Knowing and Not Knowing in Data Systems
    Viktoriia Makovska, George Fletcher, Julia Stoyanovich, and Tetiana Zakharchenko
    CoRR 2026
  3. SafeTutors: Benchmarking Pedagogical Safety in AI Tutoring Systems
    Rima Hazra, Bikram Ghuku, Ilona Marchenko, Yaroslava Tokarieva, Sayan Layek, Somnath Banerjee, Julia Stoyanovich, and Mykola Pechenizkiy
    2026
  4. Estimating the impact of the Russian invasion on the displacement of graduating high school students in Ukraine
    Tetiana Zakharchenko, Andrew Bell, Nazarii Drushchak, Oleksandra Konopatska, Falaah Arif Khan, and Julia Stoyanovich
    Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 2025
  5. ElliCE: Efficient and Provably Robust Algorithmic Recourse via the Rashomon Sets
    Bohdan Turbal, Iryna Voitsitska, and Lesia Semenova
    In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2025
  6. Large Language Models as Oracles for Ontology Alignment
    Sviatoslav Lushnei, Dmytro Shumskyi, Severyn Shykula, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, and Artur d’Avila Garcez
    In Proceedings of ECAI 2026
  7. REST-Q – A Framework to Assess Energy Consumption in Web Applications
    Ostap Kilbasovych, Belkis Djeffal, Pierre Bourhis, and Romain Rouvoy
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) 2025
  8. Constraint-aware Learning of Probabilistic Sequential Models for Multi-Label Classification
    Mykhailo Buleshnyi, Anna Polova, Zsolt Zombori, and Michael Benedikt
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on New Ideas for Large-Scale Neurosymbolic Learning Systems (LS-NSL) at VLDB 2025
  9. VirnyFlow: A Design Space for Responsible Model Development
    Denys Herasymuk, Nazar Protsiv, and Julia Stoyanovich
    CoRR 2025
  10. Still More Shades of Null: An Evaluation Suite for Responsible Missing Value Imputation
    Falaah Arif Khan, Denys Herasymuk, Nazar Protsiv, and Julia Stoyanovich
    Proc. VLDB Endow. 2025
  11. ShaRP: Explaining Rankings and Preferences with Shapley Values
    Venetia Pliatsika, João Fonseca, Kateryna Akhynko, Ivan Shevchenko, and Julia Stoyanovich
    Proc. VLDB Endow. 2025
  12. Measurement and Metrics for Content Moderation: The Multi-Dimensional Dynamics of Engagement and Content Removal on Facebook
    Laura Edelson, Borys Kovba, Hanna Yershova, Austin Botelho, Damon McCoy, and Tobias Lauinger
    Journal of Online Trust and Safety 2025
  13. CREDAL: Close Reading of Data Models
    George Fletcher, Olha Nahurna, Matvii Prytula, and Julia Stoyanovich
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data Analytics (HILDA) at ACM SIGMOD 2025
  14. ONION: A Multi-Layered Framework for Participatory ER Design
    Viktoriia Makovska, George Fletcher, and Julia Stoyanovich
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data Analytics (HILDA) at ACM SIGMOD 2025
  15. Reducing Human Effort in Evaluating Small and Medium Language Models as Students and as Teachers
    Oleh Prostakov, Viacheslav Hodlevskyi, Nassim Bouarour, Adam Sanchez-Ayte, Noha Ibrahim, and Sihem Amer-Yahia
    In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Data Science with Human in the Loop (DaSH) at VLDB 2025
  16. On Adversarial Robustness of Language Models in Transfer Learning
    Bohdan Turbal, Anastassia Mazur, Jiaxu Zao, and Mykola Pechinizkiy
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Socially Responsible Language Modeling Research at NeurIPS 2024
  17. Responsible Model Selection with Virny and VirnyView
    Denys Herasymuk, Falaah Arif Khan, and Julia Stoyanovich
    In Companion of the International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD/PODS, Santiago, Chile 2024
  18. Epistemic Parity: Reproducibility as an Evaluation Metric for Differential Privacy
    Lucas Rosenblatt, Bernease Herman, Anastasia Holovenko, Wonkwon Lee, Joshua R. Loftus, Elizabeth McKinnie, Taras Rumezhak, Andrii Stadnik, Bill Howe, and Julia Stoyanovich
    SIGMOD Rec. 2024
  19. The Possibility of Fairness: Revisiting the Impossibility Theorem in Practice
    Andrew Bell, Lucius Bynum, Nazarii Drushchak, Tetiana Zakharchenko, Lucas Rosenblatt, and Julia Stoyanovich
    In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT, Chicago, IL, USA 2023
  20. An Interactive Introduction to Causal Inference
    Lucius E.J. Bynum, Falaah Arif Khan, Oleksandra Konopatska, Joshua R. Loftus, and Julia Stoyanovich
    VISxAI: Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability 2022
  21. Epistemic Parity: Reproducibility as an Evaluation Metric for Differential Privacy
    Lucas Rosenblatt, Bernease Herman, Anastasia Holovenko, Wonkwon Lee, Joshua R. Loftus, Elizabeth Mckinnie, Taras Rumezhak, Andrii Stadnik, Bill Howe, and Julia Stoyanovich
    Proc. VLDB Endow. 2023
  22. On Fairness and Stability: Is Estimator Variance a Friend or a Foe?
    Falaah Arif Khan, Denys Herasymuk, and Julia Stoyanovich
    CoRR 2023

Press Coverage