Biography
Sarvnaz is a researcher with expertise in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. In 2012, she joined CSIRO where she started working in CSIRO language technology team as well as collaborating with researchers in eHealth program. She works on different projects including Australia at Your Service (expertise search), Adverse Drug Reaction Discovery from patient reports (information extraction from social media), Deep learning for Biomedical Text Mining, and Social media mining for emergency situational awareness (ESA). Before CSIRO, Sarvnaz was a researcher at NICTA (2008-2012) working on search and information retrieval in medical domain (BioTALA project).
Sarvnaz has been serving as chair, area-chair, and programme committee member of a number of local and international conferences in NLP and IR, including ALTA, ADCS, SIGIR, CIKM, and ACL. She has also served as reviewer of a number of journals including ACM Computing Surveys, Artificial Intelligence for Medicine, BMC medical informatics and decision making, Language Resources and Evaluation, and Information Processing & Management. Sarvnaz co-supervises PhD students from different universities across Australia through CSIRO scholarships.
Sarvnaz's formal background is in Computer Science and Software Engineering. She completed a PhD degree in Natural Language Processing, specifically on machine transliteration in 2008. Her masters thesis was in the domain of Information Retrieval, focusing on query expansion using document clustering techniques. Sarvnaz's bachelor's degree was in 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 (ICT Professional), 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
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Project Leader
Medical Decision Support Project within Precision Health Future Science Platform
Academic Qualifications
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2008
PhD Computer Science
RMIT University -
2004
MSc Computer Science
Professional Experiences
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2012-present
Research Scientist
CSIRO -
2008-2012
Researcher, NICTA, Biomedical Text Mining Project
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 Instructo
RMIT University -
2013-2015
Project Leader, Drug side-effect discovery project
CSIRO
Achievements and Awards
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2018-2018
Best Reviewer Award
EMNLP Conference -
2009-2009
Best full-paper award
ADCS -
2005-2008
IPRS
RMIT University -
2008-2008
Commendation on PhD Thesis to be of highest merit and internationally forefront in its field
RMIT University
Grants
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2018-2020
OCE grant for hiring a postdoc on Syndromic Surveillance from Social Media
Community and Corporate Citizenship
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2019-2019
Program Committee of EMNLP
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2019-2019
Program Committee of ECML
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2019-2019
Area chair of ACL
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2019-2019
Program committee NAACL
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2018-2018
Program Comittee of IUI 2019
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2018-2018
Area chair of COLING 2018
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2018-2018
Program committee of EMNLP
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2017-2018
Publicity chair of ACL 2018
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2018-2018
Program committee of AMIA
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2018-2018
Program Committee of SIGIR demonstrations
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2017-2017
Area chair of ACL
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2015-2016
Co-chair of Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS)
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2016-2020
Member of ADCS Steering commitee
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2015-present
Member of ALTA executive committee
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2014 -2018
Program committee of ALTA
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2017-2018
Program committee of ADCS
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2016-2016
Program committee ACL NEWS (Named Entities Workshop)
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2015-2015
Program Committee of CIKM
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2013-2013
Co-chair of Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA)
