Rate My Professor Hanan Aldarmaki

Professor Hanan Aldarmaki serves as Director for the Center of Teaching and Learning and Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). She earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 2019, a Master of Philosophy in Computer Speech, Text, and Internet Technology from the University of Cambridge in 2009, and a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the American University of Sharjah in 2008. Prior to joining MBZUAI in 2022, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at United Arab Emirates University. During her doctoral studies, she worked as a teaching assistant and lecturer at George Washington University and completed research internships at Apple Inc. and Amazon Web Services. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she held positions as a statistical analyst at the Statistics Center-Abu Dhabi and as a network engineer at Dubai Electricity and Water Authority.

Her research focuses on natural language and speech processing for low-resource languages, with particular emphasis on Arabic and its dialects. She explores methods including unsupervised learning, transfer learning, and distant supervision to adapt models where labeled data is scarce. This work encompasses unsupervised dictionary induction, cross-lingual embeddings, and unsupervised speech-to-text mapping, as well as the development of open-source speech and language models and datasets for Arabic. Key publications include “ArTST: Arabic Text and Speech Transformer” (ArabicNLP 2023), “ClArTTS: An Open-Source Classical Arabic Text-to-Speech Corpus” (INTERSPEECH 2023), “Unsupervised Automatic Speech Recognition: A Review” (Speech Communication, 2022), “Efficient Sentence Embedding using Discrete Cosine Transform” (EMNLP 2019), and several others from venues such as NAACL, COLING, and TACL between 2018 and 2019. She contributes to advancing applications in natural language processing through these efforts at MBZUAI.