Some Fun Facts

Instead of making a boring novel-style story about my 30+ life, I'd like to list some fun facts here. You are always welcome to check my CV if you're interested in learning more.
— I was born in the USSR(!), in the repubic of Udmurtia
— Prior to joining academia, I spent about 10 years working as a QA/software developer/researcher in Parallels, Kaspersky Labs, Yandex
— In 2014, I received a prestigious Fulbright grant to visit the US and participate in the cultural exchange program
— I attended in-person lectures of two great living philosophers: Daniel Dennett (at Montclair State University, 2014) and David Chalmers (Moscow State University, 2018)
— I was also lucky enough to meet Gerald Edelman
— I received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne in 2018 (check my PhD thesis; with Tim Baldwin and Trevor Cohn as my academic Cyril and Methodius).
— I'm a pescatarian and addicted to Melbourne coffee
— Countries I've been to (longer than 2 days): the US, Mexico, India, Israel, China, Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Malaysia, UAE, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, Croatia, Luxembourg. Prior to 2012, I was an active hitch-hiker and a couchsurfer (I guess you may still find me on couchsurfing)
— In literature, I typically prefer sci-fi, especially Stanislaw Lem's novels. Unfortunately, only a few of his most popular ones such as ``Solaris'' were translated into English. But I am trying to improve this shortcoming
— In high school, Richard Feynman and Hypatia were my role models. I very much recommend you reading "You're surely joking, Mr Feynman". Also, Norbert Wiener's ``I Am Mathematician'' is a nice one
— I very enjoy logic and linguistic puzzles. Currently, I run a math circle for 5 to 9 yo kids
— I love poetry
— The evolution of my programmer's entity: Basic > Pascal > Delphi > C > C++ > C#/Java > Python
— I play the guitar 40 minutes a day
— On lazy Sunday evenings I learn Sanskrit
— From time to time my friends switch from science to art. Here I share some that are close to my heart.
— While reading/studying I prefer listening to Strauss' waltzes, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Schnittke. I also often attend MSO concerts
— Finally, I enjoy talking to other researchers abour their work. Some pieces I would definitely recommend you are:
   — Linguist Nick Evans talking about indigenous languages in Australia;
   — Linguist Michael Fortescue talking about Eskimo-Aleut languages;
   — Astronomer David Jewitt on his discovery of the first Kuiper Belt object ;


Invited Talks

From Sign to Cosine: on Language and Computation. (UniMelb: May, 2024)
  Slides

A Glass Bead Game of *-ology: Contemporary Computational Approaches to Linguistic Morphology, Typology and Social Psychology. (MBZUAI: Mar, 2023; JNU: Nov, 2023; Sanskritologist Society: Dec 2023)
  Slides

Documenting and modeling inflectional paradigms in under-resourced languages. (Cardamom Series; Jan, 2022)
  Slides   Watch to Recording

The Secret Life of Words: Exploring Regularity and Systematicity. Episode II. (Keynote at SIGMORPHON 2021; Aug, 2021)
  Slides   Event Page

UniMorph and Morphological Inflection Task: Past, Present, and Future. (SIGTYP Lecture Series; Aug, 2021)
  Slides   Event Page   Watch the Recording

The Secret Life of Words: Exploring Regularity and Systematicity (w/Ryan Cotterell). (Moscow State University; Nov, 2020)
  Slides   Event Page   Watch the Recording

What Do Neural Models "Know'' About Natural Language? (CHDH Seminar Series; Apr, 2020)
  Slides   Event Page


Current Service & News

 ∮  May 10: An invited talk at The School of Languages and Linguistics (UniMelb)! Slides are now available

 ∮  Senior Area Chair for "Phonology, Morphology, Segmentation" (ACL 2024)

 ∮  Contributed to a chapter in "The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes" ("Word Classes in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence" w/Mel Mistica and Francis Bond)!

 ∮  Supported by ECRG to work on "Leveraging Formal Approaches to Advance Technology for Under-Resourced Languages " in 2024! Interested in the topic? Apply for a PhD!

 ∮  Nov 23: An invited talk at JNU!

 ∮  Senior Area Chair for "Lexical Semantics" (NAACL 2024)

 ∮  Co-organiser of SIGTYP (EACL 2024), FieldMatters (ACL 2024), LoResMT (ACL 2024)

 ∮  September 13: Lightning talk at the School of Computing and Information Systems

 ∮  PC Member for WMT'23 and LChange'23

 ∮ August 28: Participating in a Panel Discussion on ChatGPT and Cognitive Science at CHDH.

 ∮ August 20: Presenting the School of Computing and Information Systems at UniMelb Open Day 2023.

 ∮ July 3 & 17: Chris Ewin and myself presented the School of Computing and Information Systems at Science Day 1 at UniMelb and BSc Orientation Day.

 ∮ Area Chair for "NLP Applications" at IJCNLP-AACL 2023!

 ∮ Area Chair for "Morphology, Phonology, Segmentation" at EMNLP 2023!

 ∮ Publicity Chair at ALTA 2023!

 ∮ June 21: Conducted two immersion sessions at GoGirlGoForIT. Title: "ChatGPT, Language Models, Stochastic Parrots, and The Infinite Monkey Theorem", Colab materials are avaiable.

 ∮  May 7--12: participated in Dagstuhl Seminar 23191: Universals of Linguistic Idiosyncrasy in Multilingual Computational Linguistics, served as an editor of the final proceedings (w/Sara Stymne). Proceedings are now available!

 ∮ Co-organizer of SIGTYP, LoResMT, FieldMatters at EACL 2023!

 ∮ Senior Area Chair for "Morphology, Phonology, Segmentation" at ACL 2023

 ∮ Academic Supervisor at SummerTech Live, working on ScienceIsland with Haoze Xia, Yuhong Guo, James Marshall

Semirandom Books

Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Donald Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming. Martin Haspelmath, Andrea D. Sims. Understanding Morphology Marvin Harris. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. Christopher Bishop. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Stanislaw Lem. The Star Diaries.

Poem (by Yosano Akiko)

その路をずつと行くと
死の海に落ち込むと教へられ、
中途で引返した私、
卑怯な利口者であつた私、
それ以来、私の前には
岐路と
迂路とばかりが続いてゐる。

Acknowledgement

Sulphur Crested Cockatoos

I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation who are the traditional custodians of the land on which I live, work and write.