I am an Assistant Professor (tenure track) in the NLP Department at MBZUAI. 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.

My research aims to enhance multilingual representation of language models using efficient techniques and transfer learning. I am particularly interested in exploring multilingual NLP in areas such as

• Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for Multilingual NLP

• Dialogue systems and conversational AI 

• Human-centric NLP

• Text and Image Generation

• Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

• Fairness and Trustworthiness of NLP

• NLP Applications: Education, Finance, Health, and Creative Industry

• Parsing and Analysis of Syntax and Discourse

I am currently not recruiting interns, postdoctoral associates, or research associates. 

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, or 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 13th in the CS Ranking, and 8th for NLP. MBZUAI features top faculty members in AI and Computer Science, and offers a very generous scholarship covering: tuition, health insurance, and accommodation plus a monthly stipend (MSc: AED 8,000 and PhD: AED 10,000).