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.
Prospective students and collaborators: I am looking for motivated PhD students and research assistants to work on multilingual and multicultural NLP, language-model interpretability and evaluation, knowledge graph and neurosymbolic AI, and NLP for society. I also welcome Master’s students, though please note that our Master of Data Science is coursework-based (we do not currently offer a Master by Research), so Master’s applicants will need to secure their own funding or scholarship to enroll. If you are interested, please email me at Derry.Wijaya@monash.edu with your CV and a brief note on which of my papers or projects resonate with you.
news
| Sep 10, 2026 | Our work on mechanism-guided controlled adaptation for low-resource languages is accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. Two papers accepted to Findings of AACL 2026: modeling discourse profiles in climate misinformation, and benchmarking LLM-agent opinion dynamics against Indonesian electoral discourse (links upcoming).  |
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| 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) — a Best Paper Nominee.  |
| Mar 25, 2026 | I am honored to be featured in Monash University Indonesia’s Teachers that Transform campaign.  |
| Dec 09, 2025 | I organized the Monash Women in AI panel to discuss careers and research in artificial intelligence. |
| Sep 23, 2025 | The Data and Democracy Dialogue 2025 brought together researchers, policymakers, and civil society to examine digital transformation and democratic governance in ASEAN. |
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
- EMNLP FindingsBeyond Transfer Accuracy: Mechanism-Guided Controlled Adaptation for Low-Resource LanguagesIn Findings of EMNLP, 2026
- AIEDA Survey of AI Misconception and Adoption Among Indonesian K-12 TeachersIn International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). Best Paper Nominee (top 0.7%), 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