Karine Megerdoomian

Experience

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  New Mexico State University

  Jan 1998 - Apr 2001

  Computational linguist at Computing Research Laboratory (CRL)

  Led the development and acquisition of the linguistic aspects of the first large-scale Persian to English machine translation system (Shiraz), and contributed to various projects in ontology development and multilingual machine translation.

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  Inxight Software (now SAS)

  Jan 2002 - Aug 2005

  Computational linguist / Consultant

  Developed and maintained Persian, Arabic and Slovenian text mining systems as part of the Inxight LinguistX platform, using Xerox finite-state technology. Fully responsible for the development of morphological analyzer, tagger, shallow parsing, and information extraction modules for timely delivery cycles. As a consultant, developed an automatic transcription system of Persian named entities.

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  University of Maryland, College Park

  Sept 2005 - Oct 2006

  Research Scientist at Center for Advanced Study of Language

  Developed a large-scale test battery to investigate language acquisition and linguistic competence of Persian heritage speakers and second language learners, as part of a larger cross-linguistic research study.

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  MITRE

  Oct 2006 - Apr 2024

  Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer

  PRINCIPAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ENGINEER, MITRE (2006 – PRESENT)(Previously Senior Computational Linguist, Lead Computational Linguist)Judicial & Legal Technology Modernization department, McLean, VA• Performed R&D and led projects on narrative analytics, temporal reasoning, and cognitive search for the US Judiciary.• Led a multi-year, large-scale project for various stakeholders and organizations within the Administrative Office of the US Courts, that identifies areas where emerging technology can be successfully applied to government operations. Responsible for all aspects of project management including defining the project requirements, statement of work, scheduling and management of several parallel subprojects, research and transition approach, product development, staffing, budget maintenance, as well as performing analyses and developing NLP software for the legal and judiciary domain. The role required regular interaction with the government sponsor in the form of close coordination of project schedule and goals, and frequent status reports to the US Courts’ Technology Solutions Office and project stakeholders. • Developed and managed several research projects in multilingual social media analytics – with emphasis on online community detection, topic and ideology detection, sentiment analysis and radicalization, framing and narrative analysis – and led large-scale evaluations of commercial and government NLP systems.• Contributed to a range of projects in automated name-matching, development of annotation standards and transcription guidelines, automatic analysis of conversational and dialectal language, event analysis and temporal relations, multilingual information retrieval, machine translation, and development of instructional material for language technology. Show less

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  Georgetown University

  Aug 2012 - Jul 2017

  Adjunct Instructor

  I have taught several courses in the Communication, Culture and Technology department, exploring how new media can be analyzed computationally to gain insight into social and cultural issues. My courses taught computational methods to students with diverse academic backgrounds that can be applied for content analysis, social network analysis, and discourse analysis in social media. Course topics included the analysis of online media for sentiment analysis and opinion mining, framing and narrative detection, and understanding Middle Eastern culture and ideology. Show less

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  Florida International University

  Sept 2020 - now

  Research Affiliate

  Research project in collaboration between MITRE and FIU's Artificial Intelligence/Natural Language Processing group.

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  Zoorna AI

  Apr 2024 - now

  Founder & CEO

  - Leading an AI research and consulting lab advancing multilingual NLP, low-resource language modeling, and ethical AI systems.- Delivering strategy and advisory services to NGOs, research institutions, and global organizations adopting multilingual AI.- Driving innovative research in event detection, narrative analysis, and linguistically grounded NLP approaches.- Building AI tools and education initiatives that bridge linguistic theory, technology, and social impact.