Kat Vylomova
Per aspera ad astra

Some Fun Facts

Instead of making a boring novel-style story about my 30+ life, I'd like to list some fun facts here. You are always welcome to check my CV if you're interested in learning more.
— I was born in the USSR(!), in the repubic of Udmurtia
— Prior to joining academia, I spent about 10 years working as a QA/software developer/researcher in Parallels, Kaspersky Labs, Yandex
— In 2014, I received a prestigious Fulbright grant to visit the US and participate in the cultural exchange program
— I attended in-person lectures of two great living philosophers: Daniel Dennett (at Montclair State University, 2014) and David Chalmers (Moscow State University, 2018)
— I was also lucky enough to meet Gerald Edelman
— I received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne in 2018 (check my PhD thesis; with Tim Baldwin and Trevor Cohn as my academic Cyril and Methodius).
— I'm a pescatarian and addicted to Melbourne coffee
— Countries I've been to (longer than 2 days): the US, Mexico, India, Israel, China, Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Malaysia, UAE, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, Croatia, Luxembourg. Prior to 2012, I was an active hitch-hiker and a couchsurfer (I guess you may still find me on couchsurfing)
— In literature, I typically prefer sci-fi, especially Stanislaw Lem's novels. Unfortunately, only a few of his most popular ones such as ``Solaris'' were translated into English. But I am trying to improve this shortcoming
— In high school, Richard Feynman and Hypatia were my role models. I very much recommend you reading "You're surely joking, Mr Feynman". Also, Norbert Wiener's ``I Am Mathematician'' is a nice one
— I very enjoy logic and linguistic puzzles. Currently, I run a math circle for 5 to 9 yo kids
— I love poetry
— The evolution of my programmer's entity: Basic > Pascal > Delphi > C > C++ > C#/Java > Python
— I play the guitar 40 minutes a day
— On lazy Sunday evenings I learn Sanskrit
— From time to time my friends switch from science to art. Here I share some that are close to my heart.
— While reading/studying I prefer listening to Strauss' waltzes, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Schnittke. I also often attend MSO concerts
— Finally, I enjoy talking to other researchers abour their work. Some pieces I would definitely recommend you are:
   — Linguist Nick Evans talking about indigenous languages in Australia;
   — Linguist Michael Fortescue talking about Eskimo-Aleut languages;
   — Astronomer David Jewitt on his discovery of the first Kuiper Belt object ;

Invited Talks

Current Service & News

 ∮  May 10: An invited talk at The School of Languages and Linguistics (UniMelb)! Slides are now available

 ∮  Senior Area Chair for "Phonology, Morphology, Segmentation" (ACL 2024)

 ∮  Contributed to a chapter in "The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes" ("Word Classes in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence" w/Mel Mistica and Francis Bond)!

 ∮  Supported by ECRG to work on "Leveraging Formal Approaches to Advance Technology for Under-Resourced Languages " in 2024! Interested in the topic? Apply for a PhD!

 ∮  Nov 23: An invited talk at JNU!

 ∮  Senior Area Chair for "Lexical Semantics" (NAACL 2024)

 ∮  Co-organiser of SIGTYP (EACL 2024), FieldMatters (ACL 2024), LoResMT (ACL 2024)

 ∮  September 13: Lightning talk at the School of Computing and Information Systems

 ∮  PC Member for WMT'23 and LChange'23

 ∮ August 28: Participating in a Panel Discussion on ChatGPT and Cognitive Science at CHDH.

 ∮ August 20: Presenting the School of Computing and Information Systems at UniMelb Open Day 2023.

 ∮ July 3 & 17: Chris Ewin and myself presented the School of Computing and Information Systems at Science Day 1 at UniMelb and BSc Orientation Day.

 ∮ Area Chair for "NLP Applications" at IJCNLP-AACL 2023!

 ∮ Area Chair for "Morphology, Phonology, Segmentation" at EMNLP 2023!

 ∮ Publicity Chair at ALTA 2023!

 ∮ June 21: Conducted two immersion sessions at GoGirlGoForIT. Title: "ChatGPT, Language Models, Stochastic Parrots, and The Infinite Monkey Theorem", Colab materials are avaiable.

 ∮  May 7--12: participated in Dagstuhl Seminar 23191: Universals of Linguistic Idiosyncrasy in Multilingual Computational Linguistics, served as an editor of the final proceedings (w/Sara Stymne). Proceedings are now available!

 ∮ Co-organizer of SIGTYP, LoResMT, FieldMatters at EACL 2023!

 ∮ Senior Area Chair for "Morphology, Phonology, Segmentation" at ACL 2023

 ∮ Academic Supervisor at SummerTech Live, working on ScienceIsland with Haoze Xia, Yuhong Guo, James Marshall