Derry Wijaya
Monash University Indonesia | Boston University (Adjunct) | Jakarta, Indonesia | Derry.Wijaya@monash.edu
I am an Associate Professor and the Program Coordinator for the Data Science Program at Monash University Indonesia. I also serve as the co-director of the Monash Data and Democracy Research Hub, an interdisciplinary lab focused on analyzing and researching the impact of data and technology on democracy in the digital age.
My current research advances multilingual, multimodal, and multicultural Natural Language Processing. I work on the interpretability and steerability of language models—including mechanistic interpretability, safe model editing, and hallucination reduction—as well as evaluation frameworks that better align with human preferences (meta-metrics and LLM-as-a-judge). In parallel, I build culturally grounded resources and benchmarks for low-resource languages, covering indigenous scripts, honorifics, and code-switching. I am also deeply engaged in analyzing framing, bias, toxicity, and misinformation within AI models and public communications.
Before moving back home and joining Monash, I was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Boston University. I am a Fulbrighter, I earned my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, where I was advised by Tom Mitchell. Following that, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of Chris Callison-Burch. I hold both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Computing from the National University of Singapore, where I worked with Stephane Bressan as my advisor.
I serve as a program committee, area chair, senior area chair, session and local organizer chair for various machine learning and natural language processing conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, IJCNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, and journals.
news
| Jun 01, 2026 | Three new papers accepted in 2026: entity tracking in language models (ICML), multilingual rubric-agnostic reward reasoning (ICLR), and AI misconceptions among Indonesian K-12 teachers (AIED).  |
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| Dec 16, 2024 | I just learned about the sudden passing of my undergraduate and master’s advisor. Stéphane was the professor who first introduced me to research. He took a chance on me and involved me—an undergraduate at the time—in his research projects. Since then, I have followed his example by involving undergraduate students in my own research. I will always be grateful for his constant support, friendship, and kindness; and will miss him deeply. |
| Dec 14, 2024 | In the process of updating my website after so long!  |
selected publications
2026
- ICMLDo Language Models Track Entities Across State Changes?In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
- ICLRmR3: Multilingual Rubric-Agnostic Reward Reasoning ModelsIn International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
- pre-printBeyond Transfer Accuracy: Faithful Circuits for Controlled Low-Resource AdaptationarXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08146, 2026
2025
- EMNLPWhat Do Indonesians Really Need from Language Technology? A Nationwide SurveyIn Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025
- ACLDo Language Models Understand Honorific Systems in Javanese?In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
- ACLNusaAksara: A Multimodal and Multilingual Benchmark for Preserving Indonesian Indigenous ScriptsIn Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025