Dr Sarvnaz Karimi
Senior Research Scientist
Contact details:
Biography
Sarvnaz is a senior researcher at CSIRO's Data61. She has over 12 years of experience working in health informatics, applying her expertise at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. At CSIRO, she has worked on different projects including Medical Decision Support (with Precision Health Future Science Platform), Syndromic Surveillance for Infectious Diseases, Artificial Intelligence Roadmap, Information extraction for digital leasing, Australia at Your Service (Network 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.
Sarvnaz is very active in the research community at large, in Australia and internationally. Sarvnaz is currently deputy director of publicity at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which is the main international professional body for NLP. She is the president elect of Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA). She has served as chair, area-chair, and programme committee member of a number of major national and international conferences, including Australasian Document Computing Symposium (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 the Data61 scholarship programme, Sarvnaz currently co-supervises five PhD students from different Australian universities. Sarvnaz is a member of Australasian Institute of Digital Health.
Sarvnaz's formal background is in Computer Science and Software Engineering. She completed a PhD in Natural Language Processing in 2008. She has a masters in Artificial Intelligence, and a bachelor's degree 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 (https://research.csiro.au/lasc/home/projects/medical-decision-support/) -
Senior Research Scientist
CSIRO Low Carb Diet meals project, Responsible for evaluation using social media
Academic Qualifications
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2008
PhD Computer Science
RMIT University
Professional Experiences
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2012-present
Research Scientist
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 -
2013-2015
Project Leader, Drug side-effect discovery project
CSIRO
Achievements and Awards
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2019-2019
Part of the LaSC LIS-Accurait project team that won two merit awards at the 2019 NSW iAwards ceremony for Infrastructure and Platforms Innovation of the Year and Business Service Markets
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
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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-present
Deputy director of Publicity for Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
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2019-2020
President of Australasian Language Technology Association
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2020-2020
Program committee of The Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021)
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2020-2020
Program Committee of ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2021)
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2020-2020
Program Committee of AACL-IJCNLP
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2020-2020
Area chair of EMNLP 2020
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2019-2020
Area Chair of ACL 2020
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2019-2019
Program Committee of AAAI
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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 2019
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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 2017
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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 -2019
Program committee of ALTA
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2017-2018
Program committee of ADCS
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2016-2016
Program committee of 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)
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2021-2021
Area Chair of ACL-IJCNLP 2021
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2020-present
Reviewer for TACL
