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Zoorna Institute (USA)
Karine is the Founder & Director of Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society, with over two decades of expertise in Persian and Iranian language NLP and multilingual language technology, across academia, industry, and nonprofit research. She previously worked at MITRE as a Principal AI Engineer, leading applied research in decision-support systems. Karine earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and was the computational linguist for Shiraz, the first Persian–English machine translation system at New Mexico State University. She is also recognized for her linguistic research on complex predicates and the syntax-semantics interface.
QCRI (Qatar)
Ehsan is a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), specializing in multilingual and multimodal language processing with a focus on West Asian languages. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his master’s degree from EPFL, and has held research positions at MIT, LMU Munich, Volkswagen Group Data:Lab, and the Helmholtz Research Center. His contributions to Iranian languages include large-scale evaluation of Persian LLMs. information extraction for Persian, topic modeling of Persian poetry, and the development of resources for Kurdish, Luri, Tajiki, Azeri, and Pahlavi.
Zoorna Institute (USA)
Rayyan is a computational linguist and intern at the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society. He graduated from the University of Florida in 2023 with bachelor's degrees in Linguistics and Computer Science, where he wrote his thesis on machine transliteration between two Persian written standards: Tajik-Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic. His research focuses on NLP for social good with a focus on low-resource and marginalized language varieties.
University of Buffalo, NY (USA)
Ali is a PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics at the University of Buffalo, New York, working on morphological text processing for low-resource languages. His dissertation research develops tokenization and embedding strategies for Kurdish and addresses coverage bias in evaluation methodologies. Ali has experience in large-scale corpus processing and embedding quality assessment.
Hiwa Asadpour
Associate Researcher
Goethe University Frankfurt &
University of Saarland
Germany
Kurdish, Iranian languages, Multilingual NLP
Hadi Asghari
Scientific Researcher / Lecturer
TU Berlin
Berlin, Germany
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Zahra Bahmani
PhD Student
Sharif University of Technology
Tehran, Iran
Luri
Ali Emami
Assistant Professor
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Persian
Heshaam Faili
Professor
University of Tehran
Tehran, Iran
Persian
Masood Ghayoomi
Associate Professor
Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies
Tehran, Iran
Persian
Nizar Habash
Professor
New York University Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates
Arabic
Hossein Hassani
Assistant Professor
University of Kurdistan Hewlêr
Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq
Kurdish (Kurmanji, Sorani)
Carina Jahani
Professor
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
Iranian languages
Amir Hossein Kargaran
PhD Student
LMU-Munich
Munich, Germany
Persian, Multilingual NLP
Mohsen Mahdavi Mazdeh
Assistant Professor
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona, USA
Persian, Iranian languages
Yury Makarov
Researcher
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Shughni, Ossetian, Pamir, Iranian languages
Masoud Makrehchi
Associate Professor
Ontario Tech University
Ontario, Canada
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Corey Miller
Director, Speech Science
Rev
Austin, Texas, USA
Persian (Farsi, Dari, Tajiki), Pashto
Behrang Mohit
Machine Learning Engineer
Apple
San Francisco, California, USA
Persian
Salar Mohtaj
Research Scientist
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Berlin, Germany
Persian
Isar Nejadgholi
Senior Research Scientist
National Research Council Canada
Ottawa, Canada
Persian, Mazandarani
Muhtasham Oblokulov
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Munich RE
Munich, Germany
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Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Senior Lecturer
Cardiff University
Cardiff, United Kingdom
Persian
Mehrnoush Shamsfard
Associate Professor
Shahid Beheshti University
Tehran, Iran
Persian
Organizing Team
SilkRoadNLP 2026 is led by a team of researchers and practitioners representing academia, industry, and nonprofit research organizations. The organizers bring expertise across formal linguistics, computational linguistics, multilingual NLP, and low-resource language technologies, with a shared commitment to building equitable, linguistically grounded AI for the Iranian linguistic family.
Program Committee
Our Program Committee includes leading scholars and practitioners in computational linguistics, AI, and Iranian and typological language research.
The committee reflects SilkRoadNLP’s commitment to diversity in geography, gender, and research domain, spanning universities, research institutes, and technology organizations across the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
Their combined experience ensures high-quality, inclusive peer review and mentorship for early-career researchers and community contributors.