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), and Deep learning for Biomedical Text Mining. 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'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
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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Research Scientist
Australia At Your Service -
Research Scientist
Enhanced coding of cause of death recorded on death certificates -
Research Scientist
Emergency Situation Awareness
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 Computational Informatics
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2008-2012
Researcher, NICTA, Biomedical Text Mining Project
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2008-2012
Honorary Researcher, The University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
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2011-2011
Semester 2, Guest Lecturer at School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University (Information Retrieval Course)
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2005-2008
Sessional Tutor, Head Tutor, and Instructor, RMIT University
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2013-2015
Project Leader, CSIRO Computational Informatics, Drug side-effect discovery project
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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2018-2018
Publicity chair of ACL
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2018-2018
Area chair of COLING 2018
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2017-2018
Area chair of ACL
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2016-2016
Co-chair of Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS)
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2012-present
Volunteer Scientists at Scientist & Mathematician in School (SMiS)
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2016-present
Member of ADCS Steering commitee
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2015-present
Member of ALTA executive committee
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2018-2018
Program committee of EMNLP (Awarded Best Reviewer Award)
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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
Program committee of ALTA
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2017-2017
Program committee of ADCS
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2016-2016
Program Committee of ALTA
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2016-2016
Reviewer for BMC Medical informatics
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2016-2016
Program committee ACL NEWS (Named Entities Workshop)
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2015-2015
Co-chair of Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS)
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2015-2015
Program Committee of CIKM
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2015-2015
Program Committee of Australasian Language Technology Workshop
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2018-2018
Program Comitte of IUI 2019
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2013-2013
Co-chair of Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA)
