Dr Fajri Koto (original) (raw)
Fajri Koto, PhD
Assistant Professor at NLP Department
MBZUAI, United Arab Emirates
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.
I lead Koto MOSAIC Lab with current research focus in Human-centered NLP, encompassing areas such as:
- Cultural alignment of large language models (LLMs)
- Safety and Fairness in generative AI
- Agent-based frameworks for NLP applications across education, finance, healthcare, and the creative industries
- Reasoning and thinking models
- Efficient and low-resource methods for multilingual NLP
- Multimodal modeling
If you are a new MBZUAI student and are interested in working with me, feel free to reach out! You can contact me via email.
If you are interested in doing PhD with me and want to do the visit prior to your study:
I may be able to host a research visit (up to 6 months) starting after January 2026. If you're interested in a research collaboration, feel free to contact me via email.
For prospective graduate student:
I actively seek good PhD students. 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. Please note that I am unlikely to respond to inquiries that do not include these three documents. 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 8th in the CS Ranking for NLP. MBZUAI features top faculty members in AI and Computer Science, and offers a very generous scholarship covering monthly tuition: (MSc: AED 15,500 and PhD: AED 17,500).
What's New?
- 2026-05-09: Invited talk to Universitas Budi Luhur
- 2026-04-20: Invited talk to Universitas Indonesia
- 2026-04-07: 9 papers accepted to ACL 2026
- 2026-03-30: 1 paper accepted to AIED 2026
- 2026-03-01: 1 paper accepted to CVPR 2026
- 2026-01-12: Invited talk to UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt, Germany
- 2026-01-04: 2 papers accepted to EACL 2026
- 2025-12-09: I'll be one of panelists at AACL-SRW 2025
- 2025-11-07: Recipient of Gemini Academic Program Award for USD 50,000
- 2025-10-26: 2 papers (1 conference + 1 workshop) accepted to AACL 2025. See you in Mumbai!
- 2025-08-21: 6 papers (3 conference + 3 workshop) accepted to EMNLP 2025
- 2025-07-08: 1 paper accepted to COLM 2025
- 2025-05-15: 6 papers accepted to ACL 2025
- 2025-02-13: 2 papers accepted to NAACL 2025
- 2025-01-31: 1 paper accepted to ICLR 2025
- 2025-01-20: I'll give a keynote talk at VarDial 2025 at COLING. See you in UAE
- 2024-12-21: The competitive RDI Grant is approved. I am hiring a postdoc.
- 2024-12-19: I'll serve as the reviewer of the Computational Linguistics Journal for the next two years
- 2024-10-15: I become an Area Chair / Action Editor for ACL ARR
- 2024-10-01: I become an Area Chair for *SEM 2025
- 2024-09-30: I become the Secretary of the ACL Special Interest Group on Southeast Asian NLP (SIGSEA)
- 2024-09-30: Invited talk to Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Singapore
- 2024-09-26: 1 paper accepted to NeurIPS 2024
- 2024-09-15: 1 paper accepted to EMNLP 2024
- 2024-09-05: 1 paper accepted to TACL (will be presented at EMNLP 2024)
- 2024-07-10: I become an Area Chair for COLING 2025
- 2024-07-02: Invited talk to The University of Toronto
- 2024-05-01: Invited talk to The University of Melbourne
- 2024-04-16: 3 papers accepted to ACL 2024
- 2024-03-01: Invited talks to SMU, MBZUAI, NTU, KAUST, CMU (Qatar)
- 2024-03-13: Paper accepted to NAACL 2024
- 2024-01-08: Paper accepted to EACL 2024
- 2023-11-01: Won SEAMEO-Australia Links Education Award
- 2023-10-08: Paper accepted to EMNLP 2023
- 2023-05-06: Won the Resource Paper Award for AACL 2023
- 2023-09-05: Paper accepted to AACL 2023
- 2023-08-30: We release JAIS and JAIS-chat, the largest Arabic LLM
- 2023-05-10: Paper accepted to ACL 2023
- 2023-05-06: Won the Outstanding Paper Award for EACL 2023
- 2023-01-22: Paper accepted to EACL 2023
Contact
Fajri Koto (Assistant Professor)
NLP Department, MBZUAI, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Email: fajri.koto@mbzuai.ac.ae