group
Welcome to MANTA Lab (Multilingual AI for Narratives, Translation, and Analysis) at Simon Fraser University. We work on developing and assessing multilingual and culturally rich AI systems that serve a wide variety of users.
phd students
- Weidong Zhang — starting Fall 2026. Last stop: Northeastern University.
- Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi — starting Spring 2027. Last stop: Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
msc students
- Himani Paudayal — starting Spring 2027. Last stop: KAIST.
visiting and collaborating students
- Yves Ferstler (Spring/Summer 2026) — human-centered machine translation; visiting student at the Discourse Processing Lab, run by Maite Taboada, first-year PhD student at UQAM advised by Marie-Jean Meurs
- Himani Paudayal (Summer/Fall 2026) — safety alignment; currently an undergraduate student at KAIST
- Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi (Fall 2026) — incoming PhD student, starting Spring 2027
undergraduate students
I had the privilege of working with the following students, most of whom joined as part of CMPT 415/416:
- Ty Brassington (Summer/Fall 2026) — safety alignment, emergent misalignment
- Adam Podoxin (Summer 2026) — machine translation, multilingual NLP
- Gurneet Gill (Summer/Fall 2026) — multilingual argument structure
- Maria Kapitanenko (Summer/Fall 2026) — multilingual argument structure
- Jasleen Kaur (Summer/Fall 2026) — multilingual argument structure
- Rodrigo Añasco (Summer/Fall 2026) — multilingual argument structure
- Stella Maltcheva (Summer/Fall 2026) — multilingual argument structure
- Ben Kiddie (Summer/Fall 2026) — claim verification, factuality
- Mitch Brown (Summer/Fall 2026) — safety alignment
- Hala Obeid (Summer/Fall 2026) — creative multilingual generation
- Saemi Park (Summer/Fall 2026) — creative multilingual generation
- Emmy Fong (Summer/Fall 2026) — creative multilingual generation
- Aniyah Bohnen (Summer/Fall 2026) — creative multilingual generation
- Amandeep Manan (Summer/Fall 2026) — creative multilingual generation
- Sophia Don Tranho (Summer/Fall 2026) — creative multilingual generation
How can I contribute to MANTA's research?
You can join a research project either by signing up for CMPT 415/416 or volunteering for research. You can also try USRA (paid summer internship). If you are interested you should first fill in this form. For CMPT 415/416 you should also reach out to me directly and ask for details. In short, you will have to submit a short project description and grading schema which will be sent to me for approval. Since research is very different from a normal class it's possible that some weeks will be busier than others and that the project runs longer than the semester. If the project stretches over two semesters you can usually take the class again to get extra credit (that's why the class has two codes 415 and 416). Please note that research involves more work and engagement than your usual school project. You will be expected to contribute every week and produce final or intermediate results at the end of the semester.