Short Biography

Senior Research Director, Salesforce AI Research Palo Alto, USA [Feb'25 - ]

Associate Professor (tenured, on leave since Aug 2022), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore [Mar'22 - ]

Research Director, Salesforce AI Research Palo Alto, USA [Sep'22 - Jan'25]

Senior Research Manager (part time), Salesforce AI Research, Singapore [Feb'19 - Aug'22]

Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore [Jul'17 - Feb'22]

Research Scientist, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Doha [Jan'14 - Jul'17]

PhD in Computer Science, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver [Sep'08 - Feb'14]

Research Interests

Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Multi-lingual NLP (Machine Translation, Cross-lingual tasks)

Multi-modal NLP (NLP+Code, NLP+Vision)

Robust/adversarial NLP

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Reinforcement Learning

• 6 Oct 24Released SFR-RAG, SFR-Judge, GemFilter, FaithEval, and CRM Benchmarks
• 20 Apr 24Gave in-person invited talk at JHU CSLP. Thanks Kevin Duh, Jason Eisner and Philipp Koehn for inviting me.
• 3 Sep 23Gave a tutorial on LLM+Vis at EMNLP-23 and four keynotes on LLMs: (a) LLM-AI workshop @KDD-23, (b) KAUST Research Conference, (c) QCRI LLM Seminar, and (d) Taming LLMs workshop @SIGDIAL-23 (slides)
• 30 Jun 23Released XGen-7B LLM that supports 8K sequence length (Code, Blog).
  Good at both text and code, and specially on long sequence tasks.
• 20 Feb 23I am a PC co-chair for SIGDIAL-2023, an SAC for EMNLP-23, AC for ICLR-23, NeurIPS-23 and ACL-23
• 14 Feb 23I am a part of ICLR-23 and NAACL-22 best paper selection committees.
• 1 Sep 22I am now full time at Salesforce AI Research and on long-term leave from NTU.
• 20 Jul 22Gave a keynote at NLPIR