Blog icon

Dr Sarvnaz Karimi

Principal Research Scientist

https://people.csiro.au/K/S/Sarvnaz-Karimi

Contact

Please enter a valid first name

Please enter a valid last name

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter your message to send to the contact

Biography

Sarvnaz is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO’s Data61. She has over a decade of experience developing and applying methods in the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning for specific domains, such as health, mental health, emergency situation awareness and climate adaptation. She has supervised and mentors multiple PhD students and postdoctoral fellows over years in collaboration with CSIRO colleagues and different universities across Australia.

Sarvnaz is very active in the research community at large, in Australia and internationally. Sarvnaz is currently Director of Publicity at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which is the main international professional body for NLP. She acted as the President of Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), in which she is still an executive committee member. She has served as chair, area-chair, and Programme Committee member of a number of major national and prestigious international conferences, including Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS), the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She serves as reviewer for a number of journals, including ACM Computing Surveys, Artificial Intelligence for Medicine, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Language Resources and Evaluation, and Information Processing & Management. Through CSIRO and theData61 scholarship programme, Sarvnaz currently co-supervises three PhD students from different Australian universities. Sarvnaz completed a PhD in Natural Language Processing in 2008 (RMIT University).She has a masters in Artificial Intelligence, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering.

More information at: LinkedIn Profile, Google scholar for publication, or Publons Profile

Other Interests

Since 2012, Sarvnaz volunteers some of her time in the Scientist & Mathematician in School program (STEM Professionals), in the hope to encourage more students to study computer science. That includes visiting schools and teaching basics of computer science such as algorithms of searching and sorting, introduction to programming (e.g., Python), as well as giving public lectures or demos.

Current Roles

  • Project Leader
    Medical Decision Support Project within Precision Health Future Science Platform (https://research.csiro.au/lasc/home/projects/medical-decision-support/)

  • Principal Research Scientist
    CSIRO Low Carb Diet meals project, Responsible for evaluation using social media

  • Principal Research Scientist
    Artificial intelligence for Science, Developing NLP/ML methods to extract trends of applying AI in difference fields of science

  • Project Leader
    Epidemic intelligence of infectious diseases using social media

  • NLP Co-Lead
    Science Digital Project, Overseeing the development of NLP research and tools in the Genomics usecase

Academic Qualifications

  • 2008

    PhD Computer Science
    RMIT University

Professional Experiences

  • 2012-present

    Research Scientist
    CSIRO

  • 2013-2015

    Project Leader, Drug side-effect discovery project
    CSIRO

  • 2008-2012

    Researcher
    NICTA

  • 2008-2012

    Honorary Researcher
    Melbourne University

  • 2011-2011

    Semester 2, Guest Lecturer of Information Retrieval Course at School of Computer Science and Information Technology
    RMIT University

  • 2005-2008

    Sessional Tutor, Head Tutor, and Instructor
    RMIT University

Achievements and Awards

  • 2023-2023

    CIKM 2023 Runner-up best short paper
    ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

  • 2022-2022

    Best short-paper Award
    ALTA

  • 2020-2020

    Best short-paper Award
    ALTA

  • 2019-2019

    Infrastructure and Platforms Innovation of the Year Merit Award (LIS-Accurait project)
    iAwards NSW

  • 2019-2019

    Business Service Markets Merit Award (LIS-Accurait project)
    iAwards NSW

  • 2019-2019

    Outstanding Reviewer
    EMNLP Conference

  • 2018-2018

    Outstanding Reviewer
    EMNLP Conference

  • 2009-2009

    Best full-paper award
    ADCS

  • 2005-2008

    International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS)
    RMIT University

  • 2008-2008

    Commendation on PhD Thesis to be of highest merit and internationally forefront in its field
    RMIT University

Grants

  • 2018-2020

    OCE grant for hiring a postdoc on Syndromic Surveillance from Social Media

  • 2021-2022

    Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) 2021 Frontier Health and Medical Research Initiative (Led by UNSW Kirby Institute, EpiWatch Artificial Intelligence Early-Warning System for Epidemics)

Community and Corporate Citizenship

  • 2023-2025

    Director of Publicity for Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

  • 2022-2023

    Senior Area Chair (SAC) for ACL 2023, Resources and Evaluation track

  • 2019-2022

    Deputy director of Publicity for Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

  • 2024-2024

    Area Chair of ACL 2024 (ACL Rolling Review)

  • 2023-2024

    Area Chair of NAACL 2024 (ACL Rolling Review)

  • 2023-2024

    Area Chair of COLING-LREC 2024, Document Classification, Information Retrieval and Cross-lingual Retrieval track

  • 2024-2024

    Awards co-chair of DICTA 2024

  • 2024-2024

    Workshops co-chair of International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing

  • 2023-2023

    Program Committee of CHIIR 2024

  • 2023-2023

    Program Committee of ECIR 2024

  • 2023-2023

    Program Committee of IJCNLP-AACL 2023

  • 2023-2023

    Program Committee of ACL BioNLP 2023

  • 2023-2023

    Program Committee of AI-based Multimodal Data Analysis for Medical and Health Applications, ICONIP 2023

  • 2023-2023

    Program Committee member for the IJCNLP-AACL 2023 WIESP Workshop

  • 2022-2022

    Program Committee of EACL 2023

  • 2022-2022

    Program Committee of ECIR 2023

  • 2022-2022

    Program Committee of CHIIR 2023

  • 2022-2022

    Program Committee of AACL-IJCNLP 2022

  • 2021-2021

    Area Chair of EMNLP 2021, Information Retrieval and Text Mining track

  • 2020-2021

    Reviewer of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)

  • 2021-2021

    Area Chair of ACL-IJCNLP 2021

  • 2019-2020

    President of Australasian Language Technology Association

  • 2020-2020

    Program committee of The Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021)

  • 2020-2020

    Program Committee of ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2021)

  • 2020-2020

    Area chair of EMNLP 2020, Machine Learning for NLP track

  • 2020-2020

    Area Chair for ACL 2020, Resources and Evaluation Track

  • 2020-2020

    Program Committee of AACL-IJCNLP

  • 2019-2019

    Program Committee of AAAI

  • 2019-2019

    Program Committee of ECML

  • 2019-2019

    Program Committee of EMNLP

  • 2019-2019

    Area chair of ACL 2019, Applications Track

  • 2019-2019

    Program committee NAACL

  • 2018-2018

    Program Comittee of IUI 2019

  • 2018-2018

    Area chair of COLING 2018

  • 2018-2018

    Program committee of EMNLP

  • 2017-2018

    Publicity chair of ACL 2018

  • 2018-2018

    Program committee of AMIA

  • 2018-2018

    Program Committee of SIGIR demonstrations

  • 2017-2017

    Area chair of ACL 2017

  • 2015-2016

    Co-chair of Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS)

  • 2016-2021

    Member of ADCS Steering commitee

  • 2015-2022

    Member of ALTA executive committee

  • 2014 -2019

    Program committee of ALTA

  • 2017-2018

    Program committee of ADCS

  • 2016-2016

    Program committee of ACL NEWS (Named Entities Workshop)

  • 2015-2015

    Program Committee of CIKM

  • 2013-2013

    Co-chair of Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA)

  • 2024-2024

    Program Committee of COLM (Conference on Language Modeling)

  • 2024-2024

    Program Committee for The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics in 2025

We have publications by Dr Sarvnaz Karimi

    Published data & software

    We have published items by Dr Sarvnaz Karimi