I am a Lecturer (US/India Equivalent: Assistant Professor) in the School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW, specializing in natural language processing (NLP).

Research: As of April 2024, my papers have 3000+ citations (h-index: 26; Google Scholar), and I have been the lead investigator in grants with a cumulative total of A$3.1M, including Defence Trailblazer and Google grants as a lead CI, and NHMRC and AEA Ignite as a CI. My publications are in conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, COLING, and CONLL, and in journals such as ACM Computing Surveys and PLOS One. I have been acknowledged as an outstanding reviewer at ICML, ACL and EACL. I have presented tutorials at EMNLP, AACL, ALTA and ICON. My 2018 TEDx talk 'Detecting sarcasm, combating hate' interleaved my PhD thesis with my personal journey. I apply NLP to epidemic intelligence in my collaboration with EPIWATCH (Kirby Institute) and to cybersecurity with IFCYBER (School of CSE). I supervise undergraduate, Masters and PhD students on their research projects in NLP.

Teaching: I designed and introduced a new NLP course at UNSW in 2024. I have co-authored a textbook on NLP with Pushpak Bhattacharyya, published by Wiley in 2023.
I am an Associate of the Human Rights Institute at UNSW, and co-lead the Community of Practice for Inclusive Research with Queer, Trans & people with variations of sex characteristics. I was the organizing chair for 'Rainbow AI': a workshop to support queer students in Australia interested in HDR and research careers in AI. The workshop was funded by Google's exploreCSR grant.

Past Experience: I also have over five years of industry experience in applying NLP techniques to various domains, such as online employment marketplace, meeting analytics and epidemic intelligence. I obtained a joint PhD degree from IIT Bombay (India) and Monash University (Australia) in 2018, and a best PhD thesis award by IITB-Monash Research Academy. Before joining UNSW in 2023, I worked as a data scientist at SEEK, a market leader in online employment marketplaces, and as a machine learning engineer at Notiv, a startup that provides AI-powered meeting insights, and a senior data scientist at Fractal, a leader in analytics. In these roles, I developed and deployed recommender systems, land natural language understanding systems, using state-of-the-art tools and frameworks, such as Azure Databricks, Atlassian Suite, and PyTorch. I have also worked as a lead trainer at the Institute of Data, that offers data science certifications to industry professionals.