Alham Fikri Aji / NLP Scientist

I am an assistant professor at MBZUAI and adjunct faculty at Monash Indonesia. I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation, where I focused on enhancing the training and inference speed of machine translation. My studies were supervised by Dr. Kenneth Heafield and Dr. Rico Sennrich.

Presently, my research centers around multilingual, low-resource, and low-compute NLP. I have been developing various multilingual large language models, as well as building multilingual NLP resources for underrepresented languages, especially Indonesian. In the past, I have gained industry experience at companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple. I work closely with multilingual research communities, especially the grassroots Southeast Asia NLP community, SEACrowd. I am currently on the Advisory Board of the ACL Special Interest Group SIGSEA.

I am into competitive programming; previously an IOI 2010 Silver Medalist and an ICPC 2014 World Finalist. Nowadays, I write problems for various contests and contribute to IA-TOKI (Indonesia’s national team for the Informatics Olympiad). Recently, I have also been interested in the International Olympiad in AI (IOAI).

Research

An accurate representation of my publication output can be found on my Google Scholar profiles.

My research group at MBZUAI focuses on multilinguality, low-resource NLP, efficiency, and other exciting directions in NLP research. I also co-advise external students from Indonesia, currently collaborating mainly with ITB, Monash, and Universitas Indonesia.

If you're interested in joining as a student, please apply through the standard MBZUAI admissions process for a fully-funded PhD and MSc program with generous stipend. After acceptance, a supervisor-student matching process will take place, and I’d be happy to discuss potential collaboration at that stage.

Please note that I am not currently hiring research assistants or postdoctoral researchers.