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 current research focus is Human-centered NLP, encompassing areas such as:

• Dialogue systems and conversational AI

• Cultural alignment of large language models (LLMs)

• Fairness in generative AI

• Agent-based frameworks for NLP applications across education, finance, healthcare, and the creative industries

• Efficient and low-resource methods for multilingual NLP

• Multimodal modeling

New!!! I am currently recruiting one exceptional Postdoctoral Associate to work on Human-centered NLP for one year! Please send your CV to my email.

However I am not recruiting Research Engineer nor Intern (It may change soon, however). 

I may be able to host a research visit (up to 6 months) starting after September 2025. If you're interested in a research collaboration, feel free to contact me via email.

For prospective graduate student:

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 9th in the CS Ranking for NLP. MBZUAI features top faculty members in AI and Computer Science, and offers a very generous scholarship covering: accommodation allowance (AED 7,500) plus a monthly stipend (MSc: AED 8,000 and PhD: AED 10,000).