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Mubashara Akhtar

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I recently submitted my PhD thesis at King's College London, under the supervision of Prof. Elena Simperl and Dr. Oana Cocarascu. I am also a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, collaborating with Prof. Andreas Vlachos.

I interned at Google Deepmind in Zurich, where I worked with Julian Eisenschlos. Prior to that, I conducted a research visit with Prof. Andreas Vlachos at the University of Cambridge. I am also part of the organisation committee of the FEVER workshop and co-lead the Responsible AI committee of Croissant, an MLCommons project.

My research areas include data-centric machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and responsible AI (RAI).  Recently, I focus on knowledge-grounded NLP, developing benchmarks and large language models (LLMs) for reasoning across multimodal data such as text, tables, and images

Previously, I worked as a teaching and research assistant at TU Wien and as a software engineer and data scientist in industry, contributing to ML projects for Europe's largest telecom provider. I hold both undergraduate and master's degrees in Computer Science, with a minor in Economics, from TU Wien.

Find my CV herePlease feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat.

News

Selected Publications

Croissant: A Metadata Format for ML-Ready Datasets.

Mubashara Akhtar*, Omar Benjelloun*, Costanza Conforti*, et al.

Spotlight paper at Neurips2024.

Croissant: A Metadata Format for ML-Ready Datasets.

Mubashara Akhtar, Omar Benjelloun, Costanza Conforti, et al.

DEEM workshop @SIGMOD, 2024. (best short paper award 🥇)

ChartCheck: Explainable Fact-Checking over Real-World Chart Images.

Mubashara Akhtar, Nikesh Subedi, Vivek Gupta, Sahar Tahmasebi, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.

ACL (Findings), 2024.

Exploring the Numerical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis on Tabular Data.
Mubashara Akhtar*, Abhilash Shankarampeta*, Vivek Gupta, Arpit Patil, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.
Findings of Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.

 

Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey.
Mubashara Akhtar, Zhijiang Guo, Michael Schlichtkrull, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl, Andreas Vlachos.
Findings of Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.


Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking.
Mubashara Akhtar, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.
Findings of Annual Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2023.

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)

Honours & Awards

  • Best short paper award at DEEM 2024 for our paper introducing Croissant

  • King’s College London NMES Research Impact Award for my PhD research on multimodal fact-checking (across the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical and Engineering sciences), 2023

  • King’s College London NMES Faculty studentship, 2020-2024 

  • European Forum Alpbach scholarship, 2020-2021 

  • 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

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