Keynote Speakers
Marta R. Costa-jussà
Marta R. Costa-jussà is a research scientist at Meta AI since February 2022. She received her PhD from the UPC in 2008. Her research experience is mainly in Machine Translation. She has worked at LIMSI-CNRS (Paris), Barcelona Media Innovation Center, Universidade de São Paulo, Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore), Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Mexico), the University of Edinburgh and at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Barcelona). She has received an ERC Starting Grant and two Google Faculty Research Awards. Recently, she has participated in the No-language-left-behind (NLLB) and Seamless projects which both have been published in Nature. She has published hundreds of scientific papers and she is co-author of the novel El sueño de Mia.
Nizar Habash
Nizar Habash is a Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). He is also the director of the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab. Before joining NYUAD in 2014, he was a research scientist at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park in 2003. He has two bachelors degrees from Old Dominion University, one in Computer Engineering and one in Linguistics and Languages. His research includes extensive work on machine translation, morphological analysis, and computational modeling of Arabic and its dialects. Professor Habash has been a principal investigator or co-investigator on over 30 research grants and has over 300 publications including a book entitled "Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing". He is the founding and current President of SIGARAB, the ACL Special Interest Group on Arabic NLP. Professor Habash is one of the recipients of the King Salman Academy for Arabic Language Award (2022); and he is the recipient of the Antonio Zampolli Prize (2024).
Mariya Toneva
Mariya Toneva is a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, where she leads the Bridging AI and Neuroscience (BrAIN) group. Her research bridges natural language processing, machine learning, and cognitive neuroscience to develop computational models that deepen our understanding of how the brain processes language and guide the creation of more human-aligned AI systems. Her pioneering work at this intersection has been recognized and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the European Research Council through an ERC Starting Grant.