Professional Engagements

Post-Doctoral Fellow, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE

January 2024 – Present

PI: Dr. Ekaterina Kochmar

Research Theme: AI/LLM for Education

• Focus on the development of an LLM-powered co-pilot for education, specifically creating intelligent tutoring systems, developing comprehensive evaluation frameworks, and establishing benchmarks to track and accelerate progress in Educational NLP.
• Publications: ACL 2025, NAACL 2025, AIED 2025, COLING 2025, BEA@ACL 2025, INW@NAACL 2024
• Grant: Google Academic Grant (GARA) 2024
• Award: SAC Award at NAACL 2025

Data Scientist, Ntwist, CIE, IIITH, Hyderabad, India

July 2017 – March 2018

Job Theme: AI-driven Optimization and Automation of Gas Plant Production

• Developed deep reinforcement learning-based models to optimize and semi-automate gas plant production, considering real-world constraints that dynamically altered the exploration space.

Microsoft India (R&D), Machine Translator Team

August 2022 – December 2022

Topic: Machine Translation for Extremely Low-Resource Languages/Dialects

• Developed a novel MT system targeting extremely low-resource languages and dialects by leveraging lexical similarity with closely related high-resource languages.
• Publication: EACL 2024

Microsoft India (R&D), Auto-suggest Team

June 2021 – July 2021

Topic: Personalized Auto-suggest Text Generation for Bing Search Engine

• Designed a hybrid approach augmenting trie-based suggestions with NLG models to provide personalized auto-suggestions for Bing Search.
• Publication: ECML-PKDD 2023 (Journal Track: DAMI)

Nvidia AI Research Center, India & Shizuoka University, Japan

May 2020 – January 2021

Topic: Towards Cross-lingual Transfer and Generation for Indian Languages

• Proposed an unsupervised cross-lingual generation framework, ZmBART, to transfer supervision from high-resource to multiple low-resource languages.
• Publication: ACL 2021 (Findings)

Collaboration with Microsoft India (R&D), Academic Grant

July 2021 – June 2023

Topic: Non-toxic Multilingual Personalized Auto-suggest Generation

Role: Lead PhD Researcher

• Enhanced the quality of auto-suggestions for the Bing Search Engine.
• Mitigated problematic and toxic auto-suggestions to improve user experience.
• Publications: SIGIR 2024 and PAKDD 2024

Startup Advisor: Technical Advisor at Lending Katalyst (AI-NLP Startup) [Webpage]

February 2022 – June 2023

Topic: AI-Driven Automation for Property Title Verification

• Directed AI-ML solutions to automate property title tracing for home buyers and financial institutions.
• Addressed interdisciplinary challenges involving NLP, multilinguality, legal domain, and linguistics.

IEEE Student Branch Talk, IIT Guwahati, India

March 2025

Title: Data Augmentation Based Approach for Extremely Low Resource Machine Translation

NLP Class, IITHyderabad, India

February 2025

Title: Decoding the Craft of Machine Narratives: Overview of Evaluation Approaches in Natural Language Generation

NLG Class, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE

February 2025

Title: Challenges in NLG Evaluation: Insights from Low-Resource and Educational Domain

NLP Team, National Research Council, Canada

October 2024

Title: Towards Machine Translation for Extremely Low Resource Languages

NLP Seminar Series, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE

August 2024

Title: Data Augmentation Based Approach for Extremely Low Resource Machine Translation

NLP Team, Google Research India

September 2023

Title: Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Language Generation

SCIS, University of Hyderabad, India

August 2023

Title: Introduction to Deep Learning through the Lenses of Natural Language Processing

CSE Seminar Series, IIT Hyderabad

June 2023

Title: Hype to Reality: Responsible Text Generation with Large Language Models

KG Reddy College at Hyderabad, India, hosted by Swechha Foundation (NGO)

April 2023

Title: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and NLP

SCIS, University of Hyderabad, India

April 2022

Title: Large Language Models and Responsible Text Generation

SVECW College, Bhimavaram, AP, India

December 2021

Title: Introduction to Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing [100+ participants]

ASIC, NLP Reading and Discussion Group

May 2021

Title: An Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer Framework for Language Generation

Faculty Development Program on Data Science, Hyderabad, India

December 2020

Title: Introduction to RNN, Data Processing, and Text Classification

ACM IIT Hyderabad Student Chapter

November 2020

Title: Learning to Distract: Generation of Incorrect Options from Reading Comprehension MCQs

Blog Post – Official MBZUAI Blog

May 2025

Title: Tutors of Tomorrow – A New Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs

[Blog]

News – Emirates News Agency

November 2024

Title: MBZUAI Team Receives Google Academic Research Award

[News]  |  [Video]  |  [Blog]

Podcast – With Priya

October 2023

Topic: AI Research and Beyond

[Video]

Organizer

• Datathon Chair at IndoML 2025 (ongoing) [Website]
• Co-organizer, BEA Shared Task 2025, co-located with ACL 2025 (ongoing) [Website]
• Tutorial on “LLMs in Education,” COLING 2025 [Website]
• Head of Hybrid Infrastructure (Airmeet), ACML 2022
• One-day workshop on “Sara Translator and Recent Trends in NLP,” SCIS, University of Hyderabad, 2016
• One-day NLP meet on “Challenges in Human Evaluation for Indian Languages,” SCIS, University of Hyderabad, 2017

Session Chair

• Multilinguality and Language Diversity Track, NAACL 2025
• NLP Applications Track, COLING 2025

Reviewer

• ACL [2021–2025]
• EMNLP [2021–2024]
• NAACL [2022–2025]
• ARR
• AAAI 2021
• ICLR 2021
• SIGTYP 2021
• MLR 2021

Lead Volunteer

• EMNLP 2022
• ACML 2022

Volunteer

• ACL [2020–2022] (in-person at ACL 2022)
• EMNLP [2020–2023]
• ICLR [2020–2021]
• NeurIPS [2020–2022]
• NAACL [2021–2022]
• CIKM 2021
• ACML 2022 (in-person)

Mentorship

• Supervised M.Tech students at IITH, contributing to peer-reviewed publications:
  • Venkatesh E – ACL 2023 (Findings)
  • Kamal Shrestha and Aditi Sanjay Bagora – WebSci 2022
  • Arkadipta De and Venkatesh E – CONSTRAINT Workshop, AAAI 2021
• Academic course project mentor at MBZUAI:
  • NLG (Spring 2025, 1 group)
  • NLP (Fall 2024, 2 groups)
• Academic course project mentor at IITH:
  • NLP: Spring 2023 (2 groups), Summer 2020 (4 groups), Winter 2019 (2 groups)
  • NLP & IR: Spring 2023 (4 groups)
  • IR: Fall 2021 (7 groups), Fall 2020 (8 groups)

Teaching

• Tutorial lecture on “Evaluation of Natural Language Generation (NLG),” IITH (2025)
• Lectures and hands-on sessions for NLP/IR course at IITH (2020–2023)
• Tutorial on “Introduction to RNNs” in a Faculty Development Program, Hyderabad (2020)

Teaching Assistantship

• MBZUAI:
  • NLG (Spring 2025, 15+ students)
  • NLP (Fall 2024, 60+ students)
• IITH:
  • NLP & IR (Spring 2023, 45+ students)
  • IR: Fall 2021 (25+ students), Fall 2020 (60+ students), Fall 2019 (30+ students)
  • NLP: Spring 2021 (110+ students), Spring 2020 (45+ students)
  • Algorithms: Spring 2019 (120+ students)
• University of Hyderabad:
  • Optimization Techniques (Spring 2017, 55+ students)
  • NLP (Fall 2016, 20+ students)

Languages

• Hindi
• English
• Bhojpuri

Interests

• Traveling, Reading, Swimming, Photography, and Cooking
• Sports: Cricket and Tennis