Fajri Koto, PhD
Assistant Professor at Computing and Mathematical Sciences Division
MBZUAI, United Arab Emirates
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I am an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Division of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at MBZUAI and currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge.
Previously, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at MBZUAI, working with Prof. Timothy Baldwin and collaborating closely with Prof. Iryna Gurevych and Prof. Preslav Nakov. I hold a PhD in Engineering (Natural Language Processing) from The University of Melbourne, where I was supervised by Prof. Timothy Baldwin and Prof. Jey Han Lau. During my PhD, I was awarded the prestigious Australia Awards Scholarship. You can find my PhD thesis here.
Before my academic career, I gained 4+ years of industry experience at Samsung Research and KMKLabs. Additionally, I worked at Amazon Australia while completing my PhD.
I lead Koto MOSAIC Lab with current research focus in Human-centered NLP, encompassing areas such as:
Cultural alignment of large language models (LLMs)
Safety and Fairness in generative AI
Agent-based frameworks for NLP applications across education, finance, healthcare, and the creative industries
Reasoning and thinking models
Efficient and low-resource methods for multilingual NLP
Multimodal modeling
📢 If you are a new 1st year MBZUAI student and are interested in working with me:
I may have the opportunity to recruit two PhD students and one MSc student to join the Koto MOSAIC Lab in July 2027. We’re committed to building your research skills and supporting your growth as an independent researcher. If you’re interested in joining us, please reach out! 🤝
📢 If you're interested in a research collaboration or self-funded internship / research visit:
Feel free to contact me via email. Paid internship position is not available at the moment.
📢 For prospective graduate students:
If you are interested in pursuing a PhD under my supervision at MBZUAI, please send your CV, transcript, and a 2-page research proposal/idea to fajri.koto@mbzuai.ac.ae. Please note that I am unlikely to respond to inquiries that do not include these three documents. You can also directly apply through the MBZUAI admission portal. Upon admission, you'll have the opportunity to choose me as your supervisor.
Why MBZUAI? MBZUAI is ranked 8th in the CS Ranking for NLP. MBZUAI features top faculty members in AI and Computer Science, and offers a very generous scholarship covering monthly tuition: (MSc: AED 15,500 and PhD: AED 17,500).
📢 For Research Engineer and Postdoctoral Researcher applicants:
Unfortunately, I am not seeking any RE and Postdoc at the moment. This might change soon in December. Stay tune!
What's New?
2026-10-01: I will be a visiting scholar at The University of Cambridge.
2026-09-01: I will serve as Publication Chair in ACL 2027. See you in 🇯🇵.
2026-09-08: 3 papers accepted to AACL 2026. See you in 🇨🇳.
2026-08-21: 9 papers (7 conference + 2 workshop) accepted to EMNLP 2026. See you in 🇭🇺.
2026-08-05: Our paper "Cultural Benchmarking of LLMs in Standard and Dialectal Arabic Dialogues" was covered in several UAE local media outlets: (i) WAM (Emirates News Agency) (ii) The National including front-page coverage on 17 August 2026; (iii) Gulf News (iv) Middle East AI News (v) Al Etihad.
2026-07-12: Best Paper Award 🏆 for Social Impact at MusIML Workshop at ICML 2026
2026-05-09: Invited talk to Universitas Budi Luhur
2026-04-20: Invited talk to Universitas Indonesia
2026-04-07: 9 papers accepted to ACL 2026. See you in 🇺🇸.
2026-03-30: 1 paper accepted to AIED 2026. See you in 🇰🇷.
2026-03-01: 1 paper accepted to CVPR 2026
2026-01-12: Invited talk to UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt, Germany
2026-01-04: 2 papers accepted to EACL 2026
2025-12-09: I'll be one of panelists at AACL-SRW 2025
2025-11-07: Recipient of Gemini Academic Program Award for USD 50,000
2025-10-26: 2 papers (1 conference + 1 workshop) accepted to AACL 2025. See you in Mumbai!
2025-08-21: 6 papers (3 conference + 3 workshop) accepted to EMNLP 2025
2025-07-08: 1 paper accepted to COLM 2025
2025-05-15: 6 papers accepted to ACL 2025
2025-02-13: 2 papers accepted to NAACL 2025
2025-01-31: 1 paper accepted to ICLR 2025
2025-01-20: I'll give a keynote talk at VarDial 2025 at COLING. See you in UAE
2024-12-21: The competitive RDI Grant is approved. I am hiring a postdoc.
2024-12-19: I'll serve as the reviewer of the Computational Linguistics Journal for the next two years
2024-10-15: I become an Area Chair / Action Editor for ACL ARR
2024-10-01: I become an Area Chair for *SEM 2025
2024-09-30: I become the Secretary of the ACL Special Interest Group on Southeast Asian NLP (SIGSEA)
2024-09-30: Invited talk to Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Singapore
2024-09-26: 1 paper accepted to NeurIPS 2024
2024-09-15: 1 paper accepted to EMNLP 2024
2024-09-05: 1 paper accepted to TACL (will be presented at EMNLP 2024)
2024-07-10: I become an Area Chair for COLING 2025
2024-07-02: Invited talk to The University of Toronto
2024-05-01: Invited talk to The University of Melbourne
2024-04-16: 3 papers accepted to ACL 2024
2024-03-01: Invited talks to SMU, MBZUAI, NTU, KAUST, CMU (Qatar)
2024-03-13: Paper accepted to NAACL 2024
2024-01-08: Paper accepted to EACL 2024
2023-11-01: Won SEAMEO-Australia Links Education Award
2023-10-08: Paper accepted to EMNLP 2023
2023-05-06: Won the Resource Paper Award for AACL 2023
2023-09-05: Paper accepted to AACL 2023
2023-08-30: We release JAIS and JAIS-chat, the largest Arabic LLM
2023-05-10: Paper accepted to ACL 2023
2023-05-06: Won the Outstanding Paper Award for EACL 2023
2023-01-22: Paper accepted to EACL 2023
Contact
Fajri Koto (Assistant Professor)
NLP Department, MBZUAI, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Email: fajri.koto@mbzuai.ac.ae
EMNLP
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