International Jury and HSC

Yova Kementchedjhieva

CHAIR OF THE JURY

Assistant Professor of NLP at MBZUAI

Yova specializes in Natural Language Processing, focusing on language generation in multimodal and cross-lingual contexts. Her research explores knowledge grounding, transfer learning, and vision-and-language processing. She previously conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Copenhagen and has interned at Google. She holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen and an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Roy Ka-Wei Lee

VICE CHAIR OF THE JURY
HOST 2027 CO-CHAIR

Associate Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design

Roy is a faculty member in the Design and Artificial Intelligence (DAI) program at SUTD. His research lies at the intersection of data mining, social computing, and NLP. He is particularly known for his work on cyber-social safety and building next-generation social recommender systems. He holds a PhD in Information Systems from Singapore Management University.

Nurdaulet Akhanov

HOST 2026 CHAIR

Google software engineer

Nurdaulet Akhanov is an ex-Google software engineer and serves as Host Scientific Committee Chair for IOAI 2026.

Muhammad Rizki Aulia Rahman Maulana​

HOST 2027 CO-CHAIR

Lecturer at National University of Singapore

Rizki is a Lecturer at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests lie in deep reinforcement learning, with a recent focus on Transformers and large language models (LLMs). He received his PhD from NUS School of Computing and has completed research internships at the NVIDIA AI Technology Center and SEA AI Lab. He is also the founder of EdFab (https://edfab.org), an open-source initiative that develops tools to help educators scale their teaching and improve student learning.

Abhishek Divekar

Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon 

Abhishek Divekar is a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon, where his AI solutions have been deployed across 14 countries. His scientific research spans LLM-based evaluation, synthetic data generation, agentic systems, multi-objective prompt optimization and AI safety, with top-tier publications at AAAI, ACL and EMNLP. He was Team Lead for India’s IOAI 2025 delegation and currently serves on the 2026 IOAI ISC, leading the AI Models Track. He holds an MS in Computer Science from UT Austin.

Anna Piunova

Member of Technical Staff at Liquid AI 

Anna Piunova is a machine learning researcher and engineer at Liquid AI, working on efficient neural network architectures for audio, with an emphasis on low-latency processing and deployment under system constraints. Her work spans speech AI and real-time audio systems, including speech recognition and multi-speaker modeling. She has built and deployed production-grade speech models and contributed to research published at Interspeech and ICASSP.

Evgenii Tsymbalov

Applied Scientist at Amazon AGI

Evgenii is an expert in uncertainty estimation, deep learning, and multimodal systems. He earned his PhD from Skoltech, where he conducted research on applying machine learning to elastic strain engineering of materials at nanoscale. His work has been published in top-tier venues and journals such as ACL, EMNLP, PNAS, and IJCAI, and he frequently contributes to advancing reliable and trustworthy AI systems.

Kirill Fedyanin

Research ML Engineer at Yandex

Kirill is a Research ML Engineer specializing in self-driving technology. Previously a researcher at TII and Skoltech, he worked on large language models and uncertainty estimation, with publications in major venues including NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP.

Maxim Panov

Assistant Professor at MBZUAI 

Maxim leads the Statistical Machine Learning Group, specializing in high-dimensional statistics, uncertainty quantification, and geometric deep learning. His work provides the theoretical frameworks necessary for reliable AI in fields like structural biology.

Zijie Zheng

Director of AI Curriculum Center at Beijing National Day School  

Zijie Zheng, PhD, serves as the Director of the AI Department at Beijing National Day School and a consultant for the AI for Science Institute, Beijing. He served as the Scientific Committee Chair for the host country at IOAI 2025.

Kamalkhan Artykbayev

Part of Host Scientific Committee

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at QData, ex-Geotab CV Engineer

Ayana Mussabayeva

Part of Host Scientific Committee

PhD student in Machine Learning, MBZUAICo-founder, DSML.KZAdvising CTO, QData

Zhuldyz-Zhan Sagimbayev

Part of Host Scientific Committee

Head Machine Learning Engineer at CerebraAI a Kazakhstani AI healthcare startup building tools that help clinicians make faster, more confident decisions.More than seven years in machine learning, focused on medical imaging and computer vision — applying deep learning to real diagnostic problems where accuracy and speed genuinely matter. Holder of a master’s degree from Kazakh-British Technical University.Driven by the intersection of AI and healthcare, and the chance to build technology that has a tangible impact on patient outcomes.