Dr Alham Fikri Aji is an Assistant Professor in the Natural Language Department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Dr Aji was an applied research scientist at Amazon. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. During his postdoctoral and Ph.D., he has contributed to efficient NMT-related projects, such as Marian: a fast NMT framework and browser-based translation without using the cloud.

Aside from efficient NLP, he is now interested in developing datasets and systems for multilingual NLP especially for under-resourced languages. Dr Aji also co-initiated IndoNLP, a community-based movement to enable and advance NLP research for Indonesian languages.

Before getting into the world of AI and NLP, Dr Aji was active in competitive programming. He won a silver medal representing Indonesia in the 2010 International Olympiad of Informatics. He also worked in several well-known industries such as Apple (language engineer, 2015), Google (intern, 2017), and finally at Amazon (applied scientist, 2021). He also worked at a start-up in Indonesia which is engaged in conversational AI.