Research Journey
From statistical machine translation to national leadership in human-centred, multilingual AI — the evolution of Dr Afli's research, told through verified milestones, each linked to its publications, projects and impact.
Foundation 2009–2016
Trained in computational linguistics in France, Dr Afli completed a PhD at Le Mans Université on statistical machine translation in a multimodal context — establishing the methodological foundations in translation and multimodal language processing that still anchor his research.
- Education 2010 MA in Computational Linguistics, Université Grenoble Alpes
Master's in computational linguistics (thesis on Arabic speech translation), supervised by Prof. Laurent Besacier. Entry point into multilingual speech and language processing. · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI - Education 2014 PhD in Computer Science (NLP), Le Mans Université
Doctorate on Statistical Machine Translation in a Multimodal Context, supervised by Prof. Holger Schwenk and Prof. Loïc Barrault. Established the multimodal machine-translation foundations of the research programme. · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI - Publication 2016 Multimodal comparable corpora for machine translation (Natural Language Engineering)
Journal article (Cambridge University Press) formalising the use of multimodal comparable corpora to extract parallel data for MT. An early, peer-reviewed contribution to low-resource translation methodology. · Publication · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI
Building Research Excellence 2016–2019
Joining Munster Technological University as Lecturer and Principal Investigator, Dr Afli founded the Human-Centred AI Research Group and began a sustained programme in multilingual and Arabic NLP, translation technologies and emotion/sentiment analysis.
- Leadership 2018 Lecturer & PI at MTU; founded the Human-Centred AI Research Group
Appointed Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Principal Investigator; founded and leads the Human-Centred AI (HAI) Research Group. Created a research group that now hosts doctoral, postdoctoral and international members. · Event page · Human-Centred AI - Publication 2019 Arabic dialect identification & emotion detection (WANLP, SemEval-2019)
Hierarchical deep learning for Arabic dialect identification and the EPITA-ADAPT SemEval-2019 emotion-detection system. Consolidated a multilingual, Arabic-focused NLP track. · Publication · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI
International & European Expansion 2019–2023
His work scaled internationally through EU consortia — ITFLOWS, WARIFA, STOP and SliceNet — applying NLP to migration, health and networked systems, and founding the PoliticalNLP workshop series that bridges computational linguistics with governance and policy.
- Grant 2020 ITFLOWS (H2020) — Beneficiary
EU Horizon 2020 project applying NLP and analytics to migration flows and public attitudes; Dr Afli a beneficiary and work-package contributor. First major EU consortium role; produced political-NLP datasets and deliverables. · Event page · Project · Trustworthy AI, Safety & Governance - Award 2021 IEEE Senior Member
Elevated to Senior Member of the IEEE in recognition of professional standing. Formal recognition of professional and technical contribution. - Leadership 2022 Founded and chaired the PoliticalNLP workshop series
General Chair/Editor of the Workshop on NLP for Political Sciences (LREC 2022; LREC-COLING 2024), bridging computational linguistics with governance and policy. International research leadership through a recurring, community-building venue. · Event page · Publication · Trustworthy AI, Safety & Governance - Publication 2022 gaHealth — English–Irish bilingual health corpus (LREC 2022)
A bilingual health-domain corpus supporting Irish-language medical translation. A reusable language resource for a low-resource, high-value domain. · Publication · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI
Human-Centred AI & Research Leadership 2022–2024
Open-source multilingual tooling (adaptNMT, adaptMLLM), a European patent on privacy-preserving distributed learning, and appointment as a European Commission expert marked a shift from individual projects to research leadership in trustworthy, human-centred AI.
- Leadership 2021 Principal Investigator & MTU Lead, ADAPT Centre
PI and MTU institutional lead within the national Research Ireland ADAPT Centre for AI-driven digital content technology. Institutional leadership in a national research centre. · Event page · Project · Human-Centred AI - Industry 2021 Enterprise Ireland Innovation Vouchers (PI) with Irish SMEs
Principal Investigator on Enterprise Ireland Innovation Voucher awards with Irish SMEs (BPI-UNITEK 2018, Speire Innovation 2019, Interflow Logistics 2021). Applied research translated into SME collaborations. · Responsible Innovation & Commercialisation - Publication 2023 adaptNMT & adaptMLLM — open-source multilingual MT tooling
Open-source, language-agnostic environments for training and fine-tuning (multilingual) neural machine translation on low-resource languages such as Irish. Widely usable open-source tooling for inclusive translation research. · Event page · Publication · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI - Patent 2024 European patent — On-Air Split Federated Learning (WO/2024/227944)
Patent (filed 11 July 2024) on privacy-preserving distributed learning with positive labels, building on the group's splitfed-learning research. Translated trustworthy-AI research into protected intellectual property. · Event page · Publication · Trustworthy AI, Safety & Governance - Leadership 2024 External Expert, European Commission (REA)
Serving as an evaluator for Horizon Europe research and innovation actions with the European Research Executive Agency. Recognition as an international peer evaluator of EU research. - Grant 2024 GenDAI (Horizon Europe) — Beneficiary
Horizon Europe project on generative and data-driven AI for diagnostics/health; Dr Afli a beneficiary at MTU. Current EU project extending AI-for-health research. · Event page · Project · AI for Healthcare, Biology & Genomics
Research Impact & Recognition 2024–2026
International keynotes, national media coverage, peer-reviewed *ACL publications and a national research-centre co-leadership role (Rinn AI) established Dr Afli as a recognised voice on ethical, inclusive, multilingual AI.
- Keynote 2024 Keynote — “The Language of Life”, Hologenomic Data Analysis Symposium (Brazil)
Keynote on large language models for decoding biological data, delivered at an international symposium in São Carlos, Brazil. International keynote linking NLP and genomics. · Event page · AI for Healthcare, Biology & Genomics - Industry 2024 LinguaAnalysis co-founder — acquired by BlueTensor (2024)
Co-founded LinguaAnalysis (multilingual financial text analytics); the company was acquired in 2024 by BlueTensor (Italy); scientific adviser to BlueTensor and Emotionise.ai. Research-to-commercialisation outcome in multilingual NLP. · Responsible Innovation & Commercialisation - Media 2025 Media coverage — Cork Independent, “Ireland at AI ‘crossroads’”
Featured interview (8 May 2025) on Ireland's opportunity to lead in ethical, human-centred AI, AI literacy and precision medicine. National media visibility for the human-centred AI agenda. · Event page · In the news · Human-Centred AI - Publication 2025 Findings of EMNLP 2025 — GASE and sign-language translation evaluation
Two Findings papers: generatively augmented sentence encoding, and rethinking sign-language translation evaluation. Peer-reviewed *ACL-venue publications in evaluation and multilingual AI. · Event page · Publication · Evaluation Science & LLM-as-a-Judge - Publication 2025 ArabicNLP 2025 — winning PalmX system for Arabic cultural QA
Dual-expert and parameter-efficient LLM fine-tuning for Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning (QIAS) and Arabic cultural QA (PalmX shared task). Culturally grounded, competition-winning multilingual AI. · Event page · Publication · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI
Current & Future Vision 2026–
The research now centres on inclusive multilingual language models, cultural reasoning in generative AI, and trustworthy multilingual evaluation — advancing AI that is reliable, culturally aware and human-centred across language, health and society.
- Leadership 2026 Institutional Co-Lead, Rinn Artificial Intelligence at MTU
Institutional Co-Lead at MTU, Deputy Theme Lead (Inclusive Language Model & Translation Methods) and Principal Investigator in the national Research Ireland centre Rinn AI. National research-centre leadership role in a national Research Ireland programme. · Event page · Project · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI - Publication 2026 EACL 2026 — PTEB: robust text-embedding evaluation
Long paper on robust text-embedding evaluation via stochastic paraphrasing at evaluation time with LLMs. Peer-reviewed *ACL publication in evaluation science. · Event page · Publication · Evaluation Science & LLM-as-a-Judge - Publication 2026 IWSLT 2026 — robust cascaded speech translation (ADAPT–MTU HAI)
Shared-task system for Bhojpuri–Hindi and Irish–English speech translation. Ongoing leadership in low-resource speech translation. · Event page · Publication · Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI
This journey is assembled from the site's verified records — publications, projects, talks and news. See the full timeline.