About Me

• I am Iqra Ali, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Human-Centred Computing at Queen Mary University of London, fully funded by the EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (01-05-2024 - 31-03-2028). I am honored to be working with Prof. Maria Liaqata as my primary supervisor, with Prof. Matthew Purver as my Co-Supervisor, whose guidance has been invaluable.

• I completed my Master’s degree in the Natural Language Processing Lab at NAIST, Japan, under the supervision of Prof. Taro Watanabe, with Hidetaka Kamigaito as my Co-Supervisor. I graduated with a GPA of 3.7/4, funded by the MEXT Scholarship from the Japanese Government.

• Currently, I am collaborating with Prof. Ravi Shekhar from the University of Essex on the Text Simplification Task.  In 2023, I undertook a research internship at Fujitsu AI Lab, focusing on Multimodality and Large Language Models for Behavior Analysis, under the mentorship of Prof. Tomoya Iwakura and Tatsuya Hiraoka. Prior to this, I worked as an AI intern at Fusic Japan, where I analyzed Sentimental and Behavioral Patterns in Suicidal Ideation using Multimodal AI techniques, under the guidance of Shintaro Muroi.

Key Achievements

• 📚 PhD Candidate: I am Full time PhD student at the Centre for Human-Centred Computing at Queen Mary University of London, fully funded by the EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (01-05-2024 - 31-03-2028). 

• 🏆 Recipient Google Conference Scholarship: Authored the paper "Monolingual Paraphrase Detection Corpus for Low-Resource Pashto Language at Sentence Level", presented at LREC-COLING-2024. I received the Google Conference Scholarship for this achievement from GOOGLE.

• 🏆 Recipient of Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship: Thrilled to share that I have officially graduated with a Master’s in Engineering from NAIST, Japan, under the fully funded Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship. I’m proud to be a part of the MEXT Scholars Association.

• 💼 Industry Experience: Interned at Fujitsu AI Research Lab and Fusic Inc., Japan, working on innovative AI applications. Additionally, I worked as a Business Analyst at CureMD Healthcare IT in New York, improving customer satisfaction and processing efficiency.

• 🤝Collaborations: Had the honor of collaborating with Professor Ravi Shekhar from the University of Essex and other leading researchers, broadening the scope of my work.

• 🔎 Academic Service: Experience in reviewing journals for AI, NLP, and Security fields in AI Communication. 

Awards/Honors

• EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for PhD from Queen Mary University of London (UK  2025 - 2029)

• Recipient of Google Conference Scholarships (APAC) (April. 2024)

• MEXT Fully Funded Scholarship for Masters in Engineering from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (JAPAN 2022 - 2024)

• HEC Fully Funded Scholarship (Pakistan 2017- 2021)

• PGC Fully Funded Scholarship (Pakistan 2015 - 2017) 

Co-Curricular Activities

• AI Learning Club

Worked on the project of uplifting awareness of “Trends in AI” among students, teaching them basic AI algorithms and presentation skills.

• Literature Society

As an active member of the Literature Society, I've embraced a shared passion for literature, fostering discussions, and expanding literary horizons. 

Languages

• English [IELTS (8 overall) (2024) (L: 8.5, R: 9, W: 7, S: 7)]  | [Duo-lingo: 105]

• Urdu (Native) | Pashto (Native) | Punjabi (Native)

• Hindi (Intermediate Level) | Bangla (Intermediate Level)

• Japanese (Entry)

Hobbies

• Traveling | Hiking | Adventures| Novel Reading