About

I am an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) of Computer Science at the University of Derby, School of Computing and Engineering, College of Science and Engineering. I held a Researcher and Lecturer position at the University of Twente, Netherlands and held a post-doctoral position in the UTM Big Data Centre at the University of Technology Malaysia. I also held a Research Assistant position in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Malaya (UM).

I am a fervent advocate of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural language Processing (NLP). My research goal is computers that can intelligently process and understand human languages. I actively contribute to the innovative group at the Data Science Research Centre in the areas of data science and artificial intelligence. I have published several papers in many areas of AI, NLP, and data mining. My research received two awards (Gold Medal) from NIIDR 2015 and iidex 2016, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Malaya and did my Master's in software engineering at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University.

Teaching responsibilities

Currently, I am the module leader of the following modules:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Data management and Business intelligence
• Business Analytics

Previously, I have taught the following courses:

University of Twente:

• Natural Language Processing and E-commerce
• Database Management Systems
• Structured Query Language (SQL)

University of Technology Malaysia:

• Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
• Machine learning and deep learning 
• Text pre-processing for NLP and Machine 

I have experience in supervising postgraduate and undergraduate students.

Professional interests

My major research interests lie in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data mining. In the area of NLP and Linguistics, I worked on statistical-based, rule-based, Neural Networks-based approaches and computational models to address different problems. Within AI, I study the theoretical foundation and practical algorithms for Artificial Intelligence.

I am interested in problems related to probabilistic modelling, machine learning, and data mining, and their interdisciplinary applications such as information retrieval (IR), graph-based knowledge representation, decision support systems (DSS), recommender systems, expert systems, Education, the Health Care System and Transportation. Meanwhile, I enjoy collaborating with scientists and domain experts of different backgrounds for interdisciplinary research in data science.

Research interests

My focus is on Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and opportunities to use it in real-world domains. Specifically, over the past few years, I researched the following topics:

• Deep learning for NLP, document summarisation, and sentiment analysis
• Plagiarism detection, question/answering, Interactive Natural Language Interface
• Text relevance, knowledge representation, knowledge and reasoning
• Traffic-related content detection
• Transformation Framework to support Requirements Analysis and Modelling

Research Projects:

• Research Fellow at Comet-PS, Complexity Methods for Predictive Synchro modality
• Research Collaborator at H2020, the European H2020 program related to the circular economy transition
• Research Fellow at ALEPS, Adaptive Learning Environment for Problem Solving
• Research Fellow at Edu Feedback, an Automated system for analysing students’ feedback
• Research Fellowat TeToMoCo, (Text-To-Model-To-Code) framework that combines the state-of-the-art natural language processing approaches and techniques for identifying potential architecture elements candidates out of business requirements articulated in natural language textual description

To find out more about what I do, take a look at my papers.

Membership of professional bodies

Professional Memberships and Activities

• IEEE, membership
• UACEE, Universal Association of Computer and Electronics Engineers
• International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology

Member of Editorial Board

• Heliyon (Information Science) journal 
• Problems of Information Technologies- Journal 
• Problems of Information Society – Journal 

Guest Editor

     1. Journal of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 

• Special Issue on “Plagiarism Detection using Natural Language Processing Techniques”

     2. Applied Sciences journal 

• Special Issue on "Data Mining for Social Networks, Multimedia, and Natural Language Processing"

Session chair

• 10th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (Portugal, 2022)

Conferences Organisation and Committee Member

• 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Canada, 2023
• Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Singapore, 2023
• 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL), Indonesia,  2023
• 28th International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems, United Kingdom, 2023
• 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Republic of Korea, 2022
• Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), UAE, 2022
• 2nd Conference of AACL-IJCNLP, Taiwan, 2022
• 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Conference, Worldwide, USA, 2021
• 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Washington, USA, 2020
• 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), New York, USA, 2020
• Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Dominican Republic, 2020
• 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Italy, 2019
• Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), Hong Kong, 2019
• Association for Computational Linguistics-Human Language Technologies, New Orleans, USA, 2018
• 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Melbourne, Australia, 2018
• 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (AIS), Denmark, 2018
• AICT2018  IEEE 12th International Conference, Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2018
• 3rd International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Data Mining, Hualien, Taiwan, 2018
• Postgraduate Annual Research Seminar (PARS), UTM, Malaysia, 2018
• AICT2017 IEEE International Conference, Moscow, Russia, 2017

Technical Reviewer of the Journal - ISI indexed

• Expert Systems, Information Sciences, The Computer Journal
• Measurement– Journal, Applied soft computing
• Soft computing, Knowledge-Based Systems
• Computers in Human Behaviour, Computers & Education Journal
• PLOS ONE – Journal, IEEE Open Access
• Expert Systems with Applications

Qualifications

• Ph.D. Computer Science – University of Malaya (UM)
• Master of Technology (M. Tech.), Software Engineering, (G.P.A:  First Class) –  JNTU

Recent conferences

The list of the selected conference papers is as follows:

• Sedrakyan, G., Abdi, A., Van Den Berg, S. M., Veldkamp, B. P., & Van Hillegersberg, J. (2022). Text-To-Model (TeToMo) Transformation Framework to Support Requirements Analysis and Modeling. In MODELSWARD (pp. 129-136)
• Maitama, J. Z., Idris, N., Abdi, A., & Bimba, A. T. (2021, May). Aspect extraction in sentiment analysis based on emotional affect using supervised approach. In 2021 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data (ICAIBD) (pp. 372-376). IEEE
• Abdi, A., & Idris, N. (2015). Relevance Detection And Summarizing Strategies Identification Using Linguistic Measures. In National Invention, Innovation, Research & Design, NIIDR 2015
• Abdi, A., & Idris, N. (2014, December). Automated summarization assessment system: quality assessment without a reference summary. In The International Conference on Advances in Applied Science and Environmental Engineering-ASEE
• Abdi, A. (2012). Interactive English Natural Language Interface to Generate SQL Query. In 4th International Conference on Computer and Automation Engineering, ICCAE 2012. American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)

Experience in industry

I have worked in the industry as an instructor and data processing expert. My industry experience gave me the opportunity to convert the knowledge obtained in our laboratories into products, how to enhance production by contributing to the latest technologies etc. 

• Software Engineer (Data Processing Expert), Instructor - Social Security organisation
• Software Engineer (Data Processing Expert), Instructor - Information and Communications Technology (ICT)

Responsibility:

• Programming (Design and Development)
• Teaching
• Information governance & data governance
• Software product modelling using UML Tools
• System Analyser and Designer

International experience

• Researcher, Lecturer, University of Twente (UT), Netherlands
• Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Technology Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia
• Research Assistant, University of Malaya, Malaysia