CV
Ehsanoddin Asgari is a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), working on multilingual and multimodal language processing, with applications spanning the processing of world's low-resource natural languages to language modeling of biological sequences and chemical compounds. Ehsan completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his master's from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Before joining QCRI, he led NLP technical efforts at the Volkswagen Group at Data:Lab and conducted part-time postdoctoral research at the Helmholtz Research Center for Infection Research. His previous roles include research positions at MIT's CSAIL, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the NLP group at LMU Munich, ABB Research, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Singapore research center (ADSC).
General Information
| Name | Ehsaneddin Asgari, Ph.D. |
| easgari@hbku.edu.qa | |
| Website | https://llp.berkeley.edu/asgari/ |
| Location | Doha, Qatar |
| Interests | Natural Language Processing, Multimodal NLP, Digital Humanities, Bioinformatics |
Education
-
2019 PhD in Applied Science and Technology
University of California, Berkeley - Designated Emphasis in Computational Data Science and Engineering
- Thesis on Life Language Processing; Deep Learning-based Language-agnostic Processing of Proteomics, Genomics/Metagenomics, and Human Languages
-
2016 MSc in Applied Science and Technology
University of California, Berkeley -
2014 MSc in Computer Science
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) -
2013-2014 Master's Research Thesis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Thesis on 'Automatic Story Merging using Topic Modeling; A Case Study on the Story of Moses'
-
2011 BSc in Software Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
Experience
-
2024 - Present Scientist
Qatar Computing Research Institute -
2023 NLP Tech Lead
Volkswagen Group, AI Innovation Center -
2019 - 2022 NLP Data Scientist
Volkswagen Group, AI Innovation Center -
2019 - 2023 Postdoctoral Researcher
Helmholtz Center for Infection Research -
2017 - 2019 Research Fellow
Helmholtz Center for Infection Research -
2017 - 2018 Research Fellow
Center for Information and Language Processing, Munich -
2012 Intern - Data Mining for the Mining Industry
ABB Corporate Research, Zurich -
2010 Intern - Machine Learning Researcher
Advanced Digital Sciences Center of UIUC, Singapore
Honors and Awards
-
2024 - Ranked 1st in Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Shared-Task
-
2023 - 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting Alumni
-
2020 - ISCB Fellowship at ISMB
- Ranked 2nd in Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Shared-Task 1
-
2019 - Ranked 1st and 2nd in two out of three tasks in The Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotation algorithms (CAFA) 3.14.
-
2018 - Google Scholarship for Machine Learning Summer School
-
2016 - Best Paper Award at NAACL-HLT Workshop
- Google Travel Grant for ICML
-
2014-2016 - Graduate Division Fellowship, UC Berkeley
-
2007 - Gold medal in the Iranian National Olympiad of Literature and Linguistics.
Languages
- Persian (Native)
- English (Fluent)
- Classic Arabic (C2)
- German (B1 - Goethe Certificate)
- French (B1)
Teaching Experiences
-
2022 - 2023 Machine Learning Seminar
HZI, BIOMEDAS Program -
2020 - 2023 Natural Language Processing
Remote Graduate-Level Seminar -
2019 Deep Learning Seminar
TU Braunschweig -
2016 Data Structures and Algorithms
University of California, Berkeley -
2016 Programming Languages
University of California, Berkeley
Professional Activities & Services
- Senior Area Chair for ACL 2025
- Area Chair for ACL (2021-2025)
- Area Chair for EMNLP (2023-2025)
- Area Chair for NAACL (2023-2025)
- Area Chair for EACL (2024-2025)
- Reviewer for ACL Conferences (2018-Present)
- Editor for Frontiers in AI (NLP Section) since 2023
- Reviewer for Nature Communications
- Reviewer for Bioinformatics Journal
- Reviewer for PLOS Computational Biology Journal