Mubashara Akhtar

About me

mubashara.akhtar@kcl.ac.uk

I am a PhD student at King's College London where I am part of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence research group and supervised by Prof. Elena Simperl and Dr. Oana Cocarascu.

Currently I am interning at Google Deepmind in Zurich where I am working with Julian Eisenschlos and Jonas Pfeiffer. Prior to that I was doing a research visit with Andreas Vlachos at the Cambridge NLP Group.

My research is on multimodal approaches for automated fact checking, focusing on the modalities text, tables, and images, but also related problems such as numerical reasoning. My research is funded by a King's College London NMES faculty award.

Previously, I was a teaching & research assistant at TU Wien, as well as a Java software engineer (Vienna, Austria) and data scientist (Darmstadt, Germany) in industry. During this time I was working on machine learning projects for the biggest telecom provider in Europe.

I obtained my undergraduate and master's degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien).

Find my CV here.

News

July 2023: I started an internship at Google Deepmind. I'll be in Zurich till November.
May 2023: Check out our new paper Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey
May 2023: Received a research impact award at King's for my research on multimodal fact-checking
May 2023: Attending EACL in Dubrovnik to present our paper on Chart Fact Verification and organising FEVER
Jan 2023: Started a research visit at the Cambridge NLP group, working with Andreas Vlachos
Jan 2023: Our paper Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking was accepted to EACL
Dec 2022: I am co-organising the 6th FEVER workshop, located with EACL'23
July 2022: Presenting our paper on table fact-checking at NAACL '22 in Seattle & wrote a blog post about the conference
May 2022: Attending ACL in Dublin & wrote a blog on Multimodality at ACL 2022
April 2022: Our paper PubHealthTab: a Public Health Table-based Dataset for Evidence-based Fact Checking was accepted to NAACL
Nov 2021: Talked at the FrauenFunk! podcast about my research, women in STEM, and doing a PhD in the UK. (German)
July 2021: I am a teaching assistant at the Oxford ML Summer School
March 2021: Checkout my presentation at Imperial's NLP reading group
Dec 2020: Organising a WiML workshop at NeurIPS 2020
Dec 2020: Wrote a blog on my take-aways from EMNLP

Honours & Awards

King’s College London NMES PhD research competition award for the category "Research Impact" (across the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical and Engineering sciences)
King’s College London NMES Faculty Studentship for 2020-2024
European Forum Alpbach scholarship for the years 2020/21
Selected for US Embassy Austria's Austria to Austin program, 2019
Ban Ki-moon Center mentoring partnership (mentored by Vice Rector of TU Wien, Anna Steiger), 2019
Research scholarship from TU Wien for my master's thesis project, 2017
Summer school and conference grant from TU Wien for ACM RecSys, 2017
Merit-based scholarship from TU Wien, 2012-2016
Top 1% with 1.0 overall score at Austrian high school final exam (summa cum laude)

Blog

27. Juli 2022

Conference Insights: NAACL 2022

The 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) was run as a hybrid...

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21. Mai 2022

Conference Insights: ACL 2022

This post offers an overview of multimodal research at ACL 2022 and summarizes some conference highlights. Following two online versions...

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6. Juni 2021

NAACL 2021: Summaries of selected papers

Just one day left till the start of this year’s NAACL conference! If you’d like to attend and didn’t register yet – late registration...

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5. Dez. 2020

EMNLP 2020: Mentoring sessions, keynotes, new datasets, and take-aways for online conferences

Highlights from EMNLP 2020's keynotes/mentoring sessions/papers and tips for virtual conferences

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