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Research Profile
Poli Nemkova is an AI researcher working at the intersection of multilingual natural language processing, robust and responsible AI, and AI for Social Good. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating AI systems for decision support in complex social systems with applications to conflict forecasting, human rights monitoring, and misinformation analysis. She combines methodological contributions in NLP and machine learning with large-scale empirical studies, including dataset construction in low-resource languages, and have published at leading AI venues (AAAI, IJCAI, EACL, NeurIPS).
Research Agenda
My research focuses on developing reliable, multilingual, and socially responsible AI systems for decision support in high-stakes domains. I aim to bridge advances in machine learning and natural language processing with real-world deployment constraints in humanitarian, policy, and societal contexts. My research agenda is organized around four interrelated directions:
Agentic and uncertainty-aware AI systems for decision support. Agentic architectures integrating uncertainty estimation, metacognitive reasoning, and multi-trajectory inference to improve robustness and interpretability in forecasting and decision-making.
Multilingual and low-resource NLP for conflict forecasting and social good Methods for extracting signals from unstructured multilingual text streams; focus on low-resource languages and domain shift in conflict, human rights, and misinformation monitoring.
Evaluation, robustness, and responsible deployment of foundation models. Systematic evaluation frameworks for LLMs and generative models, including bias, stability, and failure modes in high-stakes social applications.
Education
University of North Texas (UNT), Denton, TX — Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science (AI)
2020 – Expected Spring 2026 · GPA 4.0/4.0 · Dissertation: Agentic and Multilingual Neural Architectures for Forecasting and Decision-Support in Unstructured Text Streams (Dr. Rodney D. Nielsen, Dr. Mark V. Albert)
2020–2026
University of North Texas (UNT), Denton, TX — M.S. Computer Science (AI)
2020 – 2022 · GPA 4.0/4.0 · Leadership: Founder of UNT Startup Club
2020–2022
Belarus State University, Minsk — B.S. Economics
2009 – 2015 · GPA 8/10 · Leadership: Vice President of Student Council
2009–2015
Professional Experience
University of Texas at Dallas — Adjunct Faculty, Department of Computer Science
Spring 2026: Computer Science I (CS1337). Fall 2025: Senior-level CS capstone courses (AI/NLP/ML).
Aug 2025 – now
United Nations (UNDP), Risk Anticipation Hub — Data Science Fellow
Conflict prediction research; NLP-driven experiments; model validation/optimization; stakeholder communication; integration of political/social context for interpretability.
Aug 2023 – now
AI.Fashion (Y Combinator–backed startup) — AI Researcher & Product Lead
Applied research on diffusion-based generative models; evaluation + error analysis; production pipelines; interdisciplinary leadership; collaboration with senior researchers/experts.
Aug 2023 – Jan 2025
University of North Texas — Teaching Assistant & Fellow
Graduate/undergrad teaching roles across CSCE1030/1040, CSCE5210, CSCE5214, CSCE5200, CSCE5215; lectured on AI Ethics (Summer 2025).
Aug 2020 – now
University of North Texas (HiLT Lab) — Research Assistant
ML solutions in computational linguistics and NLP (Dr. Rodney Nielsen).
Sep 2019 – Aug 2024
Research
Selected Publications
Selected Publications
LIME-LLM: Probing Models with Fluent Counterfactuals, Not Broken Text
G. Mihaila, S. O. Polat, P. Nemkova, H. Sharma, N. A. Urs, M. V. Albert
Under submission
Cross-Lingual Stability and Bias in Instruction-Tuned Language Models for Humanitarian NLP
P. Nemkova, A. Adhikari, M. Pearson, V. Krishna Sadu, A. V. Mark
Under submission
Agentic Multilingual NLP for Conflict Forecasting from Open-Source Text Streams
P. A. Nemkova, M. V. Albert
WiML @ NeurIPS 2025
NLP for Social Good: A Survey of Challenges, Opportunities, and Responsible Deployment
A. Karamolegkou, A. Borah, E. Cho, S. R. Choudhury, … P. Nemkova, … D. Dementieva (2025)
EACL 2026 · Main Track
Comparing LLM Text Annotation Skills: A Study on Human Rights Violations in Social Media Data
P. A. Nemkova, S. Ubani, M. V. Albert
AAAI 2025
Detecting Human Rights Violations on Social Media Using Machine Learning
P. A. Nemkova, S. Polat, S. Ubani, K. Nguen, R. Nielsen
AAAI 2025
Do Large Language Models Know Conflict? Investigating Parametric vs. Non-Parametric Knowledge of LLMs for Conflict Forecasting
P. A. Nemkova, S. C. Lingareddy, S. Ray Choudhury, M. V. Albert
2025
Towards Automated Situation Awareness: A RAG-Based Framework for Peacebuilding Reports
P. A. Nemkova, S. O. Polat, R. I. Jahan, S. R. Choudhury, S. Lee, S. Sarkar, M. V. Albert (2025)
Under submission · 2025
Synthetic Adaptive Guided Embeddings (SAGE): A Novel Knowledge Distillation Method
S. O. Polat, P. A. Nemkova, M. V. Albert
Under submission · 2025
Improved Bitcoin Price Prediction based on COVID-19 data
P. Nemkova, R. Moreira
IJCAI-PRICAI 2021
Conference Reviewing
Program Committee: AIES 2025
Reviewer: ICECET 2025, ICLR 2025, ACL ARR 2025, EMNLP 2023, ACM 2021, LREC 2026
Grants & External Funding
Spring 2026 — Grant for supporting student researcher assistants in Nemkova's Lab 42 research good.
May 2025 — Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group): Book contract signed (Collaboration: CRRIC)
Nov 2023 — Digital Citizen Contribution Program (Canadian Heritage): “Truth Guard” (Collaboration: CRRIC)
Aug 2025 — Digital Citizen Contribution Program (Canadian Heritage): “M³ LLM Project” (Collaboration: CRRIC) — Under review
Teaching
UNT: Spring 2026 — Big Data & Data Science (CSCE 5200) ~70 students
UT Dallas: Spring 2026 — Computer Science I (CS1337), two sections
UT Dallas: Fall 2025 — Capstone (CS4485), ~60 seniors
UNT: Fall 2025 — Big Data & Data Science (CSCE 5200) ~50 students
UNT: Summer 2025 — Machine Learning (CSCE 5215) ~40 students; lectured AI Ethics
UNT: Spring 2024 — Big Data & Data Science (CSCE 5200) ~83 students
UNT: Spring 2023 — Software Development for AI (CSCE 5214)
UNT: Fall 2022 — Introduction to AI (CSCE 5210)
UNT: 2020–2022 — C/C++ labs (CSCE 1030), ~90 students
Teaching effectiveness (selected): Instructor-of-record UT Dallas capstone mean 4.8/5.0 with 100% recommendation rate; TA evaluations across UNT graduate AI courses ~4.7/5.0 (n > 100); recurring strengths: project structure, mentorship, fairness, engagement.
GSTEP 2026 (Graduate Student Teaching Essentials Program) Participant.
Mentoring
Founder and Lead, Lab42 Research Group (AI/NLP for Social Good)
Secured funding for several research assistants
Established and lead a group of ~20 undergraduate and master’s students focused on multilingual NLP for social impact
Mentored students through the full research pipeline, resulting in peer-reviewed submissions (LREC under review; multiple manuscripts in preparation)
Supervised student researchers who continued to graduate study or industry AI roles
Invited Public Talks & Other
Oct 2025 — Invited Colloquium: “Natural Language Processing for Social Good: Modeling, Explaining, and Reasoning with Agentic Systems” — SMU, Dept. of Mathematics (Dallas, TX)
Oct 2025 — Lecture: AI applications in Health — Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (Dallas, TX)
Aug 2025 — AI for Social Good workshop — invited host and lead (São Paulo, Brazil)
Feb 2025 — AAAI 2025: “AI for Social Impact: Bridging Innovations in Finance, Social Media, and Crime Prevention” — two oral presentations
Jan 2023 — “Towards Peace through AI Research” — CRRIC, University of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, Canada)
Oct 2022 — “Algorithms and AI as an artistic protocol” — The Onstead Institute, UNT (Education as Experimentation symposium)
Aug 2022 — “AI in Media Warfare” — CRRIC, University of Winnipeg
Jan 2022 — Guest Speaker: “Data Science & AI Talk”
Awards
Dec 2025 — NeurIPS 2025 Participating Fee Award + UNT Travel Award
Mar 2025 — UNT Travel Award (AAAI 2025)
Jan 2021 — DAAD Rise Professional Scholarship (Germany)
Sep 2020; 2021 — Grace Hopper Celebration Scholarship
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