people

Current and graduated students at Boston University-Monash Indonesia (BU-MI) NLP Lab.

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.

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Current PhD Students

Khumaisa Nur’aini is a PhD student at Monash University, Indonesia. Her research focuses on data-efficient, controlled adaptation for low-resource languages, using faithful circuits and mechanistic interpretability of multilingual models.

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Adryan Kusumawardhana is a PhD student at Monash University, Indonesia, working on culturally aware language technologies, including the modeling of Javanese honorific systems with large language models.

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Zilu Tang is a PhD student at Boston University. His research spans interpretability of language models—including entity tracking across state changes—program translation, and evaluation of generation.

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Ge Gao is a PhD student at Boston University. His research examines multimodal news understanding, emotion prediction, and the societal impact of AI-generated content.

Graduated PhD Students

Tahsina Hashem (Monash University, 2026) — Faithful and Fair Text Generation from Structured and Visual Data.

Muhammed Yusuf Kocyigit, now at Google (Boston University, 2025) — Improving Evaluation Practices in NLP: Contamination and Metric Limitations.

Afra Feyza Akyürek, now at Scale AI (Boston University, 2025) — Advancing Neural Networks Beyond Initial Training.

Isidora Tourni, now at Andria Labs (Boston University, 2023) — Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Conditions.

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Research Assistants

Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah is a research assistant (Bachelor of Engineering, ITB, 2025) in the lab. His work centers on culturally grounded language technology for Indonesian languages: he is a lead author on Do Language Models Understand Honorific Systems in Javanese? (ACL 2025), which probes whether large language models capture the Javanese honorific (unggah-ungguh) system, and contributed to DriveThru, a document-extraction platform and benchmark for Indonesian local-language archives.

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Lucky Susanto is a research assistant (Bachelor of Computer Science, UI, 2024) in the lab with a broad publication record spanning evaluation, low-resource machine translation, and online-harms detection. He is a lead author on What Do Indonesians Really Need from Language Technology? A Nationwide Survey (EMNLP 2025), A Multi-Labeled Dataset for Indonesian Discourse: Toxicity, Polarization, and Demographics (ACL Findings 2025), Predicting LLM Correctness in Prosthodontics (HealthInf 2026), and a contributing author on NusaAksara (ACL 2025), MetaMetrics: Calibrating Metrics for Generation Tasks Using Human Preferences (ICLR 2025), among others.

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Musa Wijanarko is a research assistant (Bachelor in Mathematics, ITB, 2021) in the lab working on datasets and benchmarks for Indonesian NLP, with a focus on toxicity and online harms. He is a lead author on IndoToxic2024: A Demographically-Enriched Dataset of Hate Speech and Toxicity Types, and Monitoring Hate Speech in Indonesia (EMNLP 2024 Demo) and a contributing author on NusaAksara: A Multimodal and Multilingual Benchmark for Preserving Indonesian Indigenous Scripts (ACL 2025) and A Multi-Labeled Dataset for Indonesian Discourse: Toxicity, Polarization, and Demographics (ACL Findings 2025).

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Eddy Rahardjo is a research assistant (Master of Data Science, Monash, 2024) in the lab working on the Sea-Tech project—Sustainable Seaweed Cultivation through Smart Technology and Automation—funded by the Partnership for Australia-Indonesia Research (PAIR). His work applies smart technology and automation to support sustainable seaweed cultivation in Indonesia.

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Master’s and Undergraduate Students

Current Master’s students in the lab at Monash University, Indonesia include Cindy Wanady, Carina Utomo, Rizky Nur, Iqbal Alhadi, and Hesti Rahmawati.

Several of my graduated students (Master’s and Undergraduates) have published papers at *CL Conferences and Workshops, ICLR, and Q1 journals.

Master’s students include:

  • Garry Kuwanto, Genies (Boston University, 2026) — MetaMetrics, a Bayesian optimization framework for calibrating LLM evaluation metrics (ICLR 2025)

  • Hairurahman, Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (Monash, 2025) — a hybrid knowledge graph for Indonesian sentencing analysis (Artificial Intelligence and Law, 2026)

  • Iwan Darmawan, Direktorat Jenderal Pajak Republik Indonesia (Monash, 2024) — a corpus for the Javanese honorific system (ACL 2025)

  • Fariz Akyas, Harrasima Inventory Logistic (Monash, 2024) — annotator identity in an Indonesian political polarization corpus (ACL Findings 2025).

  • Adhi Pranawiyana, PLN (Monash, 2024) — predicting LLM correctness in prosthodontics using metadata and hallucination signals (HealthInf 2026)

Undergraduate students include:

  • Ryandito Diandaru, MSc at MBZUAI (ITB, 2024) — multilingual LLMs and translation, especially what linguistic features matter in LLM translation and whether English-centered multilingual modeling limits performance (LREC-COLING workshop 2024)

  • Taufiq Husada Daryanto, Twin-1 AI (ITB, 2022) — computational media framing, including detecting frames in gun-violence news (EMNLP Findings 2021)

  • Manyuan Lu, Verisk (Boston University, 2021) — social-media public-health communication, including COVID-19 moderation effects (New Media and Society 2023)

  • Alex Jones, Hiscox USA (Dartmouth, 2023) — machine translation and bitext retrieval, including bidirectional pre-translation for bitext retrieval and sentiment-based candidate selection for NMT (MT Summit 2021)

  • Nikzad Khani, Verily (Boston University, 2021) — cultural and geographic factors influence on the image translatability of words across languages (NAACL 2021)

  • Edward Edberg Halim, PhD at UW-Madison (Surya University, 2018) — computational framing analysis, including OpenFraming and frame detection in gun-violence news headlines and images (EMNLP Findings 2021)

  • Siyi Liu, PhD at University of Pennsylvania (Boston University, 2020) — computational news framing (CoNLL 2019)

  • Kunlin Cai, PhD at UCLA (Boston University, 2021) — detecting unsafe-food reports in consumer product reviews (Jamia Open 2019)