Hello 👋
I am a researcher at the MBZUAI, working under the guidance of Dr. Yova Kementchedjhieva. I completed my undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Dharwad, India. My research interests lie at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Multimodal Systems, and AI Safety. My research journey spans over two years, with publications in two core A* conference papers at EMNLP 2024 and WWW 2025, along with two workshops at top-tier NLP conferences. Previously, I was a research intern at Microsoft Research (MSR) India, a research intern at the FLaMe.nlp Research Lab, Delhi, India, working under the mentorship of Dr. Md. Shad Akhtar.
To know more, refer to my resume or drop me an email!News and Updates
- Aug 2025: MBZUAI as a Research Engineer after completing my graduation from IIIT Dharwad and concluding my tenure at Microsoft Research India.
- Jan 2025: Our paper on multimodal detection of mental health disorders in social media has been accepted at TheWebConf (WWW) 2025.
- Jan 2025: I've been invited to Google DeepMind Research Symposium 2025 aka Google Research week.
- Dec 2024: I've joined Microsoft Research India as a research intern will be working with M365 team.
- Sept 2024: Our paper LaRA on Cross modal LLM with speech got accepted at EMNLP 2024 Findings.
- Sept 2024: Started my research internship at FLaMe.nlp Research Lab.
- June 2024: Our paper on Emotion recognition in multi-party conversations (code-mixed) and emotion trigger dynamics, got accepted at SemEval 2024 co-held with NAACL '24.
- May 2024: Started my research internship at LCS2 Research Lab.
- March 2024: Our paper on Hate Speech Detection in Telugu-English Code-Mixed Text got accepted at DravidianLangTech 2024 co-held with EACL '24.
- Feb 2024: Our team, FeedForward, secured 3rd place in Tasks 1 and 2, and 5th place in Task 3 of the SemEval 2024 EDIREF competition.
- Dec 2021: Started my Bachelor degree (BTech) at IIIT Dharwad, India.
Publications
Figurative-cum-Commonsense Knowledge Infusion for Multimodal Mental Health Meme Classification
Abdullah Mazhar, , Aseem Srivastava, Polly Ruhnke, Lavanya Vaddavalli, Sri Keshav Katragadda, Shweta Yadav, Md Shad Akhtar
WWW '25 | Conference (A*) | International World Wide Web Conference 2025
paper
code
poster
LaRA: Large Rank Adaptation for Speech and Text Cross-Modal Learning in Large Language Models
, Pradyoth Hegde, Prashanth Bannulmath, Deepak KT
EMNLP (Findings) '24| Conference (A*) | Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2024
paper
code
slides
FeedForward at SemEval-2024 Task 10: Trigger and sentext-height enriched emotion analysis in multi-party conversations
, D Prasanna, E Jahnavi, Rishi Thippireddy, Vamsi Madhav, Sunil Saumya, Shankar Biradar
SemEval'24 | Workshop | Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
paper
code
slides
IIITDWD-zk@ DravidianLangTech-2024: Leveraging the Power of Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Telugu-English Code-Mixed Text
, Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu, Sunil Saumya, Shankar Biradar
DravidianLangTech '24 | Workshop | Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
paper
code
slides
Experience
Research Engineer
MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence)
Aug 2025 – Present · Abu Dhabi, UAE · On-site
Research Intern
Microsoft Research
Jan 2025 – Jul 2025 · Bengaluru, India
Research Intern
FLaMe Research Lab
Sep 2024 – Jan 2025 · IIIT Delhi · Hybrid
Research Intern
LCS2 (Lab for Computational Social Systems) · Internship
May 2024 – Sep 2024 · Delhi, India · Hybrid
NLP Intern
VocabAI · Internship
May 2023 – Oct 2024 · India