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Associate Professor of Data Science at Monash University Indonesia; Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University. Research in multilingual, multimodal, and multicultural NLP.

General Information

Full Name Derry Tanti Wijaya
Languages Javanese, Indonesian, English
Research Areas Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Multilingual & Low-Resource NLP, Interpretability and Evaluation of Language Models
Citations 4,388+ (Google Scholar, h-index 28)
Research Funding Over USD $2.3M raised as PI or Co-PI

Education

  • 2016
    Ph.D., Language Technologies Institute
    Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
    • Advisor: Tom Mitchell
    • Thesis: VerbKB — A Knowledge Base of Verbs for Natural Language Understanding
  • 2010
    M.Sc., School of Computing
    National University of Singapore
    • Advisor: Stephane Bressan
  • 2004
    B.Comp., School of Computing
    National University of Singapore

Experience

  • 2022 - now
    Associate Professor & Program Coordinator, Data Science
    Monash University, Indonesia
    • Program Coordinator, Data Science (2024–present)
    • Co-Director, Monash Data & Democracy Research Hub (2023–present)
  • 2018 - 2022
    Assistant Professor, Computer Science
    Boston University, USA (now Adjunct)
    • Co-Director, AI and Education Initiative, Hariri Institute (2021–2022)
  • 2016 - 2018
    Postdoctoral Researcher, Computer & Information Science
    University of Pennsylvania, USA
    • Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch

Honors and Awards

  • 2021
    • Best Data Researcher, Data Science Indonesia Award
  • 2019
    • University Provost's Career Development Professorship, Boston University
  • 2013
    • Anita Borg Scholarship, Google
  • 2010 - 2016
    • International Science & Technology Fellowship, Fulbright

Selected Research Grants

  • 2026
    IndigiSEA — Indigenous Digital Futures for Southeast Asia
    Monash Incubator Grant
    • USD $53k
  • 2025–2029
    Digitalising Waste Management for a Just Green Transition in Indonesian Smart Cities
    Danida, Denmark
    • USD $300k
  • 2025–2027
    Sea-Tech: Sustainable Seaweed Cultivation through Smart Technology
    Partnership for Australia-Indonesia Research (PAIR)
    • USD $61k
  • 2024
    Contextualizing LLMs for Women's Sexual & Reproductive Health in Indonesia (PI)
    Google Research Award
    • USD $60k
  • 2024
    ASEAN Disinformation Index
    Monash Data Futures Institute
    • USD $33k
  • 2024
    Boosting Monash's Global Reputation: Data & Democracy Hub
    Monash Incubator Grant
    • USD $53k
  • 2023
    Monitoring Hate Speech toward Vulnerable Communities, 2024 Indonesia Election
    Open Society Foundation
    • USD $37k
  • 2023
    Exploring Generative AI for Moderating Online Polarisation (PI)
    Monash Data Futures Institute
    • USD $35k
  • 2022–2023
    Bhinneka: Multilingual Indonesian Resources
    Indonesian Ministry of Education (US Collaboration)
    • USD $45k
  • 2021
    Exploring the Evolution of Racial Biases through Framing Analysis (PI)
    Google Research Scholar Award
    • USD $60k
  • 2019–2022
    LEARN — Label-Efficient Active Resilient Network (Co-PI)
    DARPA, Learning with Less Labels
    • USD $462k
  • 2019–2021
    Bridging Linguistic and Visual Knowledge through Visual Genome (PI)
    Hariri Institute Research Incubation Award
    • USD $28k
  • 2019–2020
    AIDA: Semi-supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations
    DARPA (with C. Callison-Burch)
    • USD $100k
  • 2019
    ExploreCSR: Supporting and Promoting Undergraduate Research for Women
    Google
    • USD $18k
  • 2018–2022
    BIGDATA: Multiplatform, Multilingual & Multimodal Tools for Analyzing Public Communication in 100+ Languages
    NSF (with M. Betke, L. Guo, P. Ishwar)
    • USD $1,000,000

Academic Interests

  • Interpretable & Steerable Language Models
    • Mechanistic interpretability of multilingual and multimodal models
    • Safe model editing, controllability, and hallucination reduction
  • Evaluation of Generative Models
    • Meta-metrics, LLM-as-a-judge, and rubric-agnostic reward reasoning
    • Aligning evaluation with human preferences and values
  • Multilingual & Low-Resource NLP
    • Data-efficient transfer for low-resource languages
    • Machine translation from dictionaries and grammars; code-switching generation
  • Multicultural AI & NLP for Society
    • Culturally aware models; preservation of indigenous scripts and honorifics
    • Bias, polarization, toxicity, hate speech, and misinformation; AI for health

Professional Service

  • Area / Senior Area / Session Chair: ACL, EMNLP, IJCNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR
  • Organizer: AACL 2026 (Hengqin); SEALP Workshop @ COLING 2025; CALCS Workshop @ NAACL 2025; AACL 2023 (Bali)