Group Members

Jump to postdocs, doctoral students, RAs, master students, alumni.

Faculty

Thamar Solorio

Thamar Solorio

Professor of Natural Language Processing

Thamar’s research interests include all things multilingual, low-resource NLP, information extraction, and, more recently, multimodal problems.

Email: firstnameperiodlastname@mbzuai.ac.ae

X: thamar_solorio

Postdocs

Toqeer Ehsan

Toqeer Ehsan

March 2024 - Present

Toqeer Ehsan is a postdoctoral researcher at MBZUAI, holding a doctoral degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Natural Language Processing (NLP). His research primarily focuses on developing systems for low-resource languages to perform tasks such as Information Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Machine Translation, and Code-mixed text analysis. He also works on cross-lingual data augmentation techniques to address the challenges posed by the scarcity of annotated data in low-resource languages.

Email: toqeer.ehsan@mbzuai.ac.ae

  • Ph.D. Computer Science

Injy Hamed

Injy Hamed

April 2024 - Present

Injy Hamed is a Postdoctoral Associate at MBZUAI. She received her PhD from Stuttgart University and worked as a Research Assistant at CAMeL Lab in New York University Abu Dhabi prior joining MBZUAI. Her research interest focuses on code-switched and Arabic natural language processing, where she worked on corpora collection, speech recognition, text generation and machine translation.

Email: injy.hamed@mbzuai.ac.ae

  • Ph.D. Computer Science

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja

March 2025 - Present

Atnafu is a Postdoctoral researcher at MBZUAI. He recived his PhD in Computer Science from Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico, where he was supervised by Prof. Alexander Gelbukh and Prof. Olga Kolesnikova. Atnafu’s research interests include NLP for low-resourced languages, Multilingual language models, Speech & Multimodal NLP, and NLP for African languages. Personal website | Google Scholar

Email: atnafuatx [at] gmail [dot] com

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science
  • M.Sc in Information Technology
  • B.Sc in Computer Science

Doctoral Students

Emilio Villa-Cueva

Emilio Villa-Cueva

August 2024 - Present

Emilio Villa-Cueva is a PhD student at MBZUAI. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT). His research focuses on building systems capable of understanding human communication across different languages and cultures in a multimodal setting. He is also interested on exploring methods that utilize minimal labeled data through few-shot learning. Before, he has worked on domain adaptation, cross-lingual transfer, and clickbait spoiling. Personal website

Email: evillacueva [at] gmail [dot] com

  • MS in Computer Science and Industrial Mathematics
  • PhD in Natural Language Processing (currently)

Research Assistants

Master Students

Mahardika Krisna Ihsani

Mahardika Krisna Ihsani

August 2023 - Present

Krisna is an MSc student at MBZUAI with interests lie in representation learning for low-resource languages, model interpretability, and alignment. His grand goal of research is to propose better learning paradigm (that might also ground linguistic heuristics) or model arhitecture that could generalize well to underrepresented languages where scaling doesn’t work and producing representation that can be disentangled easily enabling easier alignment on different values. Personal website

Email: mahardika.ihsani@mbzuai.ac.ae

  • M.Sc in Natural Language Processing, MBZUAI, in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
  • B.Cs in Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia, in Depok, Indonesia.

Alumni

Jesus-German Ortiz-Barajas

Jesus-German Ortiz-Barajas

German holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His current work focuses on information extraction tasks using parameter-efficient techniques for low-resource languages, aiming to enhance accessibility and usability of NLP technologies. Personal website

January 2024 - October 2024

  • MSc. Computer Science