Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh is an Iranian British academic who is a professor at

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

. She was awarded a senior research fellowship at the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senio ...

in 2022.

Early life and education

Sadrzadeh is from

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees at

Sharif University of Technology Sharif University of Technology (SUT); (, romanized : Dāneshgāh-e sana'ti-e sharif) is a public research university in Tehran, Iran. It is widely considered to be the nation's most prestigious and leading institution for science, technology ...

. After earning her master's degree Sadrzadeh moved to

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

. She was a doctoral researcher first at the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a Official bilingualism in Canada, bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ot ...

, where she was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a University of Ottawa Excellence Scholarship, and a Canada Female Doctoral Student Award, and then at the

Université du Québec à Montréal The (UQAM; ), is a French language, French-language public university, public research university based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the largest constituent element of the system. UQAM was founded on April 9, 1969, by the government o ...

. Her research considered epistemic logic. Alongside earning her doctorate, Sadrzadeh moved to the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

as an EPSRC postdoctoral fellow.

Research and career

In 2011, Sadrzadeh was awarded an

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British UK Research Councils, Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical scienc ...

Career Acceleration Fellowship. She was appointed to the faculty at

Queen Mary University of London Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, or informally QM, and formerly Queen Mary and Westfield College) is a public university, public research university in Mile End, East London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University ...

, where she combined statistical and logical methods to study how language works. Whilst

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

can improve reasoning about textual data, systems making use of machine learning cannot be translated to all applications. Sadrzadeh develops tensor-based mathematical models to improve these processes by combining logic, statistics and machine learning to strengthen the information from textual data. These models are based on the

DisCoCat DisCoCat (Categorical Compositional Distributional) is a mathematical framework for natural language processing which uses category theory to unify distributional semantics with the principle of compositionality. The grammatical derivations in a ...

framework that she introduced with

Bob Coecke Bob Coecke (born 23 July 1968) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician who is Chief Scientist at quantum computing company Quantinuum. He was Professor of Quantum foundations, Logics, and Structures at Oxford University until 2020. He ...

and Stephen Clark. She was awarded two industrial fellowships from the

, which allowed her to build partnerships with the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

. In particular she concentrated on the development of tensorial analysis for textual understanding of subtitles and news. At the time it was estimated that the average adult spends about one and a half years of their lives trying to device what to watch on broadcasting platforms. Sadrzadeh looks to improve the quality and accuracy of recommendation algorithms. Sadrzadeh is involved in the conference SemSpace (Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science). In 2020, Sadrzadeh gave a talk "Gaussianity and typicality in matrix distributional semantics" and in 2021 she was co-organiser. In 2022, Sadrzadeh was awarded a

Senior Fellowship.

Selected publications

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sadrzadeh, Mehrnoosh Academics of University College London Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Université du Québec à Montréal alumni Sharif University of Technology alumni Iranian expatriate academics Iranian emigrants to the United Kingdom