Alham Fikri Aji / Curriculum Vitae

alham.fikri@mbzuai.ac.ae

Education

  • PhD, University of Edinburgh Nov 2016 - Jun 2020
    Thesis: Approximating Neural Machine Translation for Efficiency.
    Supervised by Kenneth Heafield and Rico Sennrich.
    Examiner: Graham Neubig and Barry Haddow
  • MSc Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh Sep 2014 - Aug 2015
    With distinction. Final project: Haiku generator with word vector model.
  • BSc Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia Aug 2010 - Jul 2014
    Final project: Earthquake detector from phone’s accelerometer reading.

Working Experience

  • Visiting Research Scientist, Google Research Sep 2024 - Current
  • Adjunct Assistant Professor, Monash Indonesia Jan 2024 - Current
  • Assistant Professor, MBZUAI Jan 2023 - Current
  • Applied Scientist, Amazon Alexa AI Oct 2021 - Jan 2023
  • Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Edinburgh Jun 2020 - Jul 2021
  • Research Scientist, Kata.ai Nov 2019 - Sep 2021
  • Engineering Intern, Google Research Jul 2017 - Nov 2017
  • Language Engineer, Apple Siri Oct 2015 - Oct 2016

Awards

  • Best Resource Paper Award, EACL 2024
  • Best Resource Paper Award, AACL 2023
  • Outstanding Paper Award, EACL 2023
  • Outstanding Contribution Award, WNGT 2019
  • World Finalists, ACM-ICPC 2014
  • Silver Medalists, International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI) 2010

Professional Activities

Services to Scientific Communities

  • Adversary Board: The ACL Special Interest Group on SEA NLP (SIGSEA)
  • Reviewer and Program Committee Member
    • Conferences: ARR, ACL, COLING, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, LREC
    • Workshop: WNGT, TL4NLP
  • Area Chair: ARR (2024+), ACL (2023), EMNLP (2023), COLM (2024)
  • Local Chair: COLING (2025)
  • Organizer: South-East Asia Language Processing (2023, 2025), Semeval shared task organizer (2024, 2025)

University Services

  • MBZUAI Admission Commitee, MBZUAI 2024
  • MBZUAI HPC Committee, MBZUAI 2023
  • MBZUAI PhD Qualifying Exam Committee, MBZUAI 2023
  • MBZUAI Executive Education Program advisor, 2023
  • MBZUAI PhD Candidacy Exam Committee: 5 students
  • MBZUAI MSc Thesis Defence Committee: 7 students

Informatics Olympiad

  • Problem Setter: OSN Indonesia (2013, 2014, 2015), ACM-ICPC (2014, 2015), APIO (2015), Gemastik (2016)
  • Committee: Gemastik (2016), TOKI-Open (2018), IOI (2022)
  • Training: Indonesia’s Pre-OSN Distance training (2009, 2010), Indonesia’s National Camp (2011, 2012, 2013), University of Edinburgh ACM-ICPC preparation (2014), Saudi Arabia National Team (2020)

Publications

I mainly publish at ACL conferences. You may also refer to my Google Scholar for an updated list of publications.
denotes my role as (Co-)senior author(s), whereas denotes my role as main author(s).

Peer-Reviewed Conferences

Peer-Reviewed Workshops

Supervision and Mentorship

Current Students

Note:
As a Co-Advisor, I actively advise students (mainly from different universities) and I commit to meeting them frequently to discuss their work.
As a Secondary Advisor, I usually do not interact with the students regularly and am not typically involved in the research work.

  • Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo — Primary Advisor2023 - present
    Role: PhD ; 2nd supervisor: Thamar Solorio
  • Jan Christian Blaise Cruz — Primary Advisor2024 - present
    Role: PhD ; 2nd supervisor: Thamar Solorio
  • Jonibek Mansurov — Main Advisor2024 - present
    Role: PhD
  • Ahmed Elshabrawy — Primary Advisor2023 - present
    Role: MSc ; 2nd supervisor: Iryna Gurevych
  • Erland Fuadi — Primary Advisor2024 - present
    Role: MSc
  • Ahmed Attia — Primary Advisor2024 - present
    Role: MSc
  • Sama Hadhoud — Primary Advisor2024 - present
    Role: MSc
  • Alaa Elsetohy — Primary Advisor2024 - present
    Role: MSc
  • Moses Ananta — Co Advisor2023 - present
    Role: MSc ; co-supervising with: Ayu Purwarianti (Institut Teknologi Bandung)
  • Fathinah Asma Izzati — Secondary Advisor2023 - present
    Role: MSc ; main supervisor: Gus Xia
  • Aidar Myrzakhan — Secondary Advisor2023 - present
    Role: MSc ; main supervisor: Zhiqiang Shen
  • Hanif Muhammad Zhafran — Co Advisor2024 - present
    Role: BSc ; co-supervising with: Ayu Purwarianti (Institut Teknologi Bandung)
  • M Rifqi Farhansyah — Co Advisor2024 - present
    Role: BSc ; co-supervising with: Ayu Purwarianti (Institut Teknologi Bandung)
  • Lyzander Andrylie — Co Advisor2024 - present
    Role: BSc ; co-supervising with: Alfan Farizki (Universitas Indonesia)
  • Inaya Rahmanisa — Co Advisor2024 - present
    Role: BSc ; co-supervising with: Alfan Farizki (Universitas Indonesia)

Past Students

Research Advisorship

Grants and Funding

  • Google Cloud Research Credit
    Amount: 5,000 USD
  • Microsoft Research: “Developing Robust Methodology and Datasets for Holistic Evaluation of Cultural Awareness and Bias in Foundation Models” (Co-PI)
    Amount: 20,000 USD
  • Cohere For AI research grants: “SEACrowd: Consolidating South-east Asia NLP dataset” (Co-PI)
    Amount: 3,000 USD
  • IBM: “Question Answering for Arabic Dialects”
    Amount: Postdoctoral support of Chenyang Lyu of 100,000 USD

Teachings

  • NLP702/NLP806: Advanced Natural Language Processing (for MSc and PhD) - MBZUAI Spring 2025
    Main instructor. Covered advanced NLP topics, including LLMs, distributed training, multilinguality, interpretability, and multimodality in NLP.
  • FIT5145: Intro to Data Science (for MSc) - Monash Indonesia Term 4 2024
    Main instructor. Introduction to Python, data science, and AI.
  • NLP702: Advanced Natural Language Processing (for MSc) - MBZUAI Spring 2024
    Co-instructor. Covered efficient and large-scale NLP, including LLM, distributed training, distillation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and linear Transformers.
  • NLP801: Deep Learning for Language Processing (for PhD) - MBZUAI Fall 2023
    Main instructor. Designed and taught the module, covering various recent research topics and trends in NLP.

Talks

  • Collaborative Multilingual Data Collection
    Keynote at WiNLP, Co-located with EMNLP 2024 (15th November 2024)
  • Insights from Language Resource Collection in Linguistically Diverse Southeast Asian Languages
    Keynote at Field Matter Workshop, Co-located with ACL 2024 (16th August 2024)
  • Training Lightweight Model via Knowledge Distillation and Parameter Efficient Finetuning
    Mexican NLP Summer School, Co-located with NAACL 2024 (14-15th June 2024)
  • Consolidating NLP Resources for South-East Asian Languages
    Google Singapore, Invited Talk (27th May 2024)
  • Constructing High-Quality Corpora for Underrepresented and Extremely Low-Resource Languages
    Google Singapore, Invited Talk (21th November 2023)
  • Building Multilingual & Multicultural LLMs: Methods and Challenges
    AI Singapore, Invited Talk (20th November 2023)
  • Q2AI: A Quick Course to Quick AI
    PRICAI, Tutorial (17th November 2023)
  • Current Status of NLP in South East Asia with Insights from Multilingualism and Language Diversity
    AACL, Tutorial (1st November 2023)
  • Surviving your PhD Study
    Telkom University, Invited Talk (2nd August 2023)
  • Generative AI with Large Language Models Workshop
    Institut Teknologi Bandung, Invited Talk (1st August 2023)
  • Multilingual and Low-Resource NLP
    Universitas Indonesia & Tokopedia AI Center, Invited Talk (25th May 2023)
  • Can AI Complete My Academic Writings?
    Doctrine UK, Online Talk (14th May 2023)
  • Multilingual NLP through Collaborative Research
    The 2nd Composable, Automatic and Scalable Learning Workshop (CASL), Invited Talk (23rd February 2023)
  • Sequence-to-Sequence and Neural Machine Translation Model
    Universitas Indonesia, Guest Lecture (28th April 2021)