Team – RiTUAL Group at MBZUAI

Principal Investigator

Thamar Solorio

Professor of Natural Language Processing

Professor Solorio’s research interests include all things multilingual, low‑resource NLP, information extraction and, more recently, multimodal problems. She leads the RiTUAL group at MBZUAI and mentors students across multiple research programmes.

Research Staff

Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri

Postdoctoral Researcher

Abhirama is a postdoctoral researcher working jointly with Dr. Yova Kementchedjhieva and Prof. Thamar Solorio. His current research focuses on enhancing grounded generation in vision-language models (VLMs), with an emphasis on shortcut learning and reasoning-oriented VLMs. His broader interests include efficient VLMs and multi-image, structure-aware (tabular) VQA. He pursued his doctoral studies from IIT Jodhpur. His doctoral work focused on retrieval-augmented methods for improving VLMs on knowledge-intensive visual tasks.

Multimodality RAG Question Answering

Aseem Srivastava

Postdoctoral Researcher

Aseem is a postdoctoral researcher working jointly with Prof. Thamar Solorio and Prof. Monojit Choudhury. He received his PhD from IIIT Delhi. His research focuses on how people interact in digital environments and using large language models to address social challenges related to digital health and cultural dynamics.

NLP Well-being Social Safety

Kaushal Kumar Maurya

Research Scientist

Kaushal's research focuses on the development of language-based computational models and tools for social good, with an emphasis on multilingual NLP, responsible NLP, and AI/LLMs for education.

Multilingual NLP Responsible AI AI for Education

An Vo

Research Engineer

An Vo obtained his MS from KAIST, where he received the Outstanding Thesis Award. He is broadly interested in foundation models, with a focus on making them more trustworthy and explainable. His work has been used and featured by industry labs (Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Cohere) and accepted at top-tier AI conferences (ICLR, ICML, AAAI, GECCO).

Trustworthy AI Explainable AI

PhD Students

Emilio Villa-Cueva

PhD Student

Emilio's research focuses on building and evaluating socially intelligent AI systems in multimodal settings, with a particular emphasis on how audiovisual information can be processed to understand social dynamics. He is also interested in multilingual NLP, language adaptation of large language models, and few-shot learning. Prior to his PhD, he earned a master's degree in Computer Science and a bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics. He was also a visiting researcher at the LIT Lab at the University of Michigan.

Multimodal AI Social Intelligence Vision-Language Models Theory of Mind

Fadel Thior

PhD Student

Fadel Thior is a PhD student in NLP at MBZUAI. His research interests are on code‑switched text and ASR, with an emphasis on data‑efficient training, and robust evaluation. He aims to build inclusive speech technologies that work reliably for underrepresented communities.

ASR Low Resource Code Switching

Thang Le

PhD Student

Thang Le is a PhD student at MBZUAI. His research interests include multilingual information extraction and cross‑lingual transfer.

Multilingual-NLP Information Extraction

Master's Students

Kareem Elzeky

MSc Student

Kareem Elzeky is passionate about natural language processing, multimodal AI, and aligning large language models with human intent. His interests include cross-lingual understanding, multimodal AI, and exploring how models can learn from both text and human feedback.

Interpretability Personalization Multimodality

Mena Attia

MSc Student

Mena is a second-year Master's student in Natural Language Processing at MBZUAI. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Cornell University. Her research focuses on Arabic NLP and cultural alignment in large language models, with a focus on figurative language. She investigates how LLMs understand and pragmatically use Arabic idioms and proverbs, and explores the broader relationship between figurative language and cultural knowledge, aiming to advance culturally grounded AI systems.

figurative language LLMs cultural alignment Arabic NLP

Sholpan Bolatzhanova

MSc Student

Sholpan Bolatzhanova is a 2nd year MSc student at MBZUAI. Her research interests are Multimodal LLMs and Theory of Mind.

LLMs MAS

Diana Turmakhan

MSc Student

Diana Turmakhan is a 2nd year MSc student at MBZUAI. Her research interests include vision-language models, multimodal reasoning, low-resource NLP, and culturally-aware AI.

Multimodal Reasoning Multilingual NLP Embodied Systems