Fajri Koto, PhD
Assistant Professor at NLP Department
MBZUAI, United Arab Emirates
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).
What's New?
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