Rate My Professor Alham Fikri Aji

Alham Fikri Aji is an Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing in the Department of NLP at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), where he joined in January 2023. He also serves as adjunct faculty at Monash Indonesia since January 2024 and as a visiting research scientist at Google Research since September 2024. Professor Aji earned a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 2020, an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Universitas Indonesia in 2014. Prior to his current roles, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation from 2020 to 2021 and worked as an applied scientist at Amazon from 2021 to 2023. His earlier experience includes positions as a language engineer at Apple from 2015 to 2016, an intern at Google in 2017, and roles at an Indonesian conversational AI start-up.

Professor Aji’s research focuses on efficient natural language processing through model compression and distillation, as well as NLP for under-resourced and multilingual languages, including dataset curation, data-efficient learning, zero-shot approaches, and multilingual language models. He is active in Indonesian and Southeast Asian NLP communities and co-initiated IndoNLP. He has received the Early Career Researcher Award at MBZUAI, an Outstanding Paper Award at EACL 2023, and other honors including the Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education Doctoral Scholarship and recognition as a silver medalist at the 2010 International Olympiad in Informatics. Key publications include “One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia” (ACL, 2022), “Marian: Fast neural machine translation in C++” (ACL, 2018), and “In Neural Machine Translation, What Does Transfer Learning Transfer?” (ACL, 2020). His work has achieved an H-index of 33 with multiple best or outstanding paper awards, and he contributes to the field through workshop organization, invited talks, and advisory roles such as on the ACL SIGSEA board.