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

  • MBZUAI’s “Rising Star Award” 2026
  • MBZUAI’s “Early Career Researcher Award” 2025
  • Best Resource Paper Award, ACL 2025
  • Best Theme Paper Award, NAACL 2025
  • 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

Selected Projects

My research centers on making NLP and LLM technology more inclusive and accessible, especially for underrepresented languages and communities. Representative projects across data, models, methods, and community-building are summarized below.

Area Highlights
Datasets Built multilingual, multimodal, and culturally grounded datasets for underrepresented languages, including SEACrowd, NusaCrowd, NusaX, NusaWrites, CVQA, BRIGHTER, Macaron, Copal-ID, and M4.
LLMs Contributed to open multilingual and lightweight language model families that support cross-lingual and low-resource NLP research, including BLOOMZ, mT0, Lamini-LM, and Cendol; currently a Visiting Research Scientist at Google Research working on Gemini's multilingual capability.
Methods Developed efficient and low-compute LLM methods for language modeling, attention, memory-efficient decoding, and cross-lingual adaptation, including TOP, Softpick, and SENSIA.
Community Active in Indonesian and Southeast Asian NLP community-building through SEACrowd, SIGSEA, SEALP, shared tasks, workshops, open-resource coordination, and mentorship for regional researchers and students.

Professional Activities

Services to Scientific Communities

  • Advisory Board
    • The ACL Special Interest Group on SEA NLP (SIGSEA) (2025 - present)
    • WiNLP (2025 - present)
  • Reviewer / AC
    • Conferences: ARR, ACL, COLM, COLING, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, LREC
    • Workshops: WNGT, TL4NLP
  • Organizing Committee
    • Local Chair: COLING (2025)
    • Organizer: South-East Asia Language Processing (2023, 2025), Semeval shared task organizer (2024, 2025), MELT at COLM 2025

University Services

  • NLP Admission Committee Lead (MBZUAI) 2025/2026
  • Undergraduate Admission Committee Lead (MBZUAI) 2025/2026
  • PhD Qualifying Exam Committee Lead (MBZUAI) 2025
  • Postgraduate Online Admission Exam Committee Member (MBZUAI) 2025
  • NLP Admission Committee Member (MBZUAI) 2024/2025
  • HPC Committee Member (MBZUAI) 2023
  • PhD Qualifying Exam Committee Member (MBZUAI) 2023
  • Executive Education Program Advisor (MBZUAI) 2023
  • PhD Thesis Defence Committee
    • Dr. Muhammad Arslan Manzoor (2025)
  • PhD Candidacy Exam Committee (Total: 5 students)
  • MSc Thesis Defence Committee (Total: 10 students)

Informatics and AI Olympiad

  • Problem Setter / Jury
    • OSN Indonesia (2013-2015), ACM-ICPC Regional Jakarta (2014, 2015), APIO (2015), Gemastik (2016), ICPC Asia Championship (2025), IOAI (2025)
  • Scientific Committee
    • Organized various Informatics Olympiads, including Gemastik (2016), TOKI-Open (2018), IOI (2022), and Indonesia’s National Olympiad in AI (2025).
  • Training
    Active in Informatics Olympiad training for both IOI and ICPC.
    • Indonesia’s Pre-OSN Distance training (2009, 2010), Indonesia’s National Camp (2011-2013), Saudi Arabia National Team (2020)
    • ICPC Trainer and Coach: University of Edinburgh (2014), MBZUAI (2025)

Supervision and Mentorship

Current Students

Research Staff

External Advisorship

I also advise some external students, mostly UG and mainly from Indonesia.

  • Rafael (Institut Teknologi Bandung) 2025 - Present
    Co-advised with Ayu Purwarianti
  • Mohamad Maulana Firdaus Ramadhan (Institut Teknologi Bandung) 2025 - Present
    Co-advised with Ayu Purwarianti
  • Abel Aprilani (Institut Teknologi Bandung) 2025 - Present
    Co-advised with Ayu Purwarianti

Past Students

Grants and Funding

Project Awarding Body Amount Dates Info
Persuasive Booking Agent Chatbot Etihad $450,000 2025-2026 Nils Lukas (PI), Salem Lahlou, Alham Fikri Aji, Mingming Gong, Martin Takac
Question Answering for Arabic Dialects IBM-MBZUAI Collaboration ~$150,000 2023–2027 Part of IBM-MBZUAI collaboration. No money change between parties, so fund comes from MBZUAI for postdoc hiring and data-annotation cost.
Token-Order Prediction Manifold Labs ~$70,000 2025 Alham Fikri Aji and Zayd Zuhri (Research Engineer, MBZUAI). Unlimited acess to 8xH200 node.
Sink-free Attention in Transformers Fal.ai $12,500 2025 Alham Fikri Aji and Zayd Zuhri (Research Engineer, MBZUAI).
Lambda Multimodal AI Grand Challenge Lambda $10,000 2025 Genta Indra Winata (Capital One), Patrick Amadeus Irawan (PhD student, MBZUAI), Alham Fikri Aji
Google Cloud Research Credit Google $5,000 2024-2025 PI: Alham Fikri Aji.
SEACrowd: Consolidating South-east Asia NLP dataset Cohere For AI $3,000 2024 Together in collaboration with SEACrowd communities

Teachings

  • Algorithm and Data Structure (UG) Spring 2026
    MBZUAI (Co-instructor). Algorithm and data structure for first-year undergraduate students
  • NLP702/NLP806: Advanced Natural Language Processing (for MSc and PhD) Spring 2026
    MBZUAI (Co-instructor). Covered advanced NLP topics, including LLMs, distributed training, multilinguality, interpretability, and multimodality in NLP.
  • NLP702/NLP806: Advanced Natural Language Processing (for MSc and PhD) Spring 2025
    MBZUAI (Main instructor). Covered advanced NLP topics, including LLMs, distributed training, multilinguality, interpretability, and multimodality in NLP.
  • FIT5145: Intro to Data Science (for MSc) Term 4 2024
    Monash Indonesia (Main instructor). Introduction to Python, data science, and AI.
  • NLP702: Advanced Natural Language Processing (for MSc) Spring 2024
    MBZUAI (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) Fall 2023
    MBZUAI (Main instructor). Designed and taught the module, covering various recent research topics and trends in NLP.

Talks

  • Code-Switching Thought Patterns in Multilingual Language Models 3rd May 2025
    Keynote at CALCS, Co-located with NAACL 2025
  • On Grassroots Effort for Low-Resource Data Collection 20th Jan 2025
    Keynote at CLTW, Co-located with COLING 2025
  • Collaborative Multilingual Data Collection 15th Nov 2024
    Keynote at WiNLP, Co-located with EMNLP 2024
  • Insights from Language Resource Collection in Linguistically Diverse Southeast Asian Languages 16th Aug 2024
    Keynote at Field Matter Workshop, Co-located with ACL 2024
  • Training Lightweight Model via Knowledge Distillation and Parameter Efficient Finetuning 14-15th Jun 2024
    Mexican NLP Summer School, Co-located with NAACL 2024
  • Consolidating NLP Resources for South-East Asian Languages 27th May 2024
    Google Singapore, Invited Talk
  • Constructing High-Quality Corpora for Underrepresented and Extremely Low-Resource Languages 21st Nov 2023
    Google Singapore, Invited Talk
  • Building Multilingual & Multicultural LLMs: Methods and Challenges 20th Nov 2023
    AI Singapore, Invited Talk
  • Q2AI: A Quick Course to Quick AI 17th Nov 2023
    PRICAI, Tutorial
  • Current Status of NLP in South East Asia with Insights from Multilingualism and Language Diversity 1st Nov 2023
    AACL, Tutorial
  • Surviving your PhD Study 2nd Aug 2023
    Telkom University, Invited Talk
  • Generative AI with Large Language Models Workshop 1st Aug 2023
    Institut Teknologi Bandung, Invited Talk
  • Multilingual and Low-Resource NLP 25th May 2023
    Universitas Indonesia & Tokopedia AI Center, Invited Talk
  • Can AI Complete My Academic Writings? 14th May 2023
    Doctrine UK, Online Talk
  • Multilingual NLP through Collaborative Research 23rd Feb 2023
    The 2nd Composable, Automatic and Scalable Learning Workshop (CASL), Invited Talk
  • Sequence-to-Sequence and Neural Machine Translation Model 28th Apr 2021
    Universitas Indonesia, Guest Lecture

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).
Underline denotes MBZUAI students and researchers (including visiting/interns).

Peer-Reviewed Conferences

Peer-Reviewed Workshops