About Me

My name is Parishad BehnamGhader. I am currently a PhD student at the McGill NLP research group at McGill University and Mila, Montreal, Canada under Prof. Siva Reddy’s supervision. I am also an ML Research Intern at Borealis AI this summer. I got my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran and I was previously a researcher at Machine Learning Lab in computer engineering department under the supervision of Prof. Mahdieh Soleymani. I am mainly interested in Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing. More specifically, I am currently working on the reasoning ability of retriever-based large language models.

Publications

Parishad BehnamGhader*, Vaibhav Adlakha*, Marius Mosbach, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Nicolas Chapados, Siva Reddy (*Equal Contribution)
COLM 2024
Vaibhav Adlakha, Parishad BehnamGhader*, Xing Han Lu*, Nicholas Meade*, Siva Reddy (*Core Contribution)
TACL 2024 Journal, Will be presented at ACL 2024
Parishad BehnamGhader*, Aristides Milios* (Equal Contribution)
NeurIPS 2022 (Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning - TSRML Workshop)
Parishad BehnamGhader, Hossein Zakerinia, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
NAACL 2021 (TextGraphs-15 Workshop)

Experiences

Researcher

Jan 2022 - Present
McGill NLP & Mila, Montreal, Canada

Supervised by Prof. Siva Reddy

Machine Learning Research Intern

May 2024 - Sep 2024
Borealis AI, Montreal, Canada

Supervised by Siqi Liu and Eric Jiawei He

Researcher

Oct 2018 - Feb 2021
Machine Learning Laboratory, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Research Intern

Jun 2020 - Aug 2020
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern, Germany

Software Intern

Jul 2018 - Sep 2018
Cafe Bazaar, Tehran, Iran

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science

2022 - present
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

GPA: 4.0/4

I started my studies at McGill University as a master’s student and fast-tracked to PhD in Jan 2024.

M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence

2018 - 2021
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

GPA: 18.83/20

Thesis Project: “Graph-based Word Embedding using Deep Neural Networks”, under the supervision of Prof. Mahdieh Soleymani

B.Sc. in Software Engineering

2014 - 2018
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

GPA: 18.75/20

Thesis Project: “Prediction of Products’ Features’ Rates with Sentiment Analysis”, under the supervision of Prof. Mahdieh Soleymani

Diploma in Mathematics and Physics Discipline

2014
Farzanegan2 High School, Tehran, Iran (Affiliated with National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents)

GPA: 19.85/20

Honors & Awards

Recipient of the McGill University J.W. McConnell Memorial Fellowship (5,000 CAD)

2024

Recipient of the Mila's PhD Women in AI Excellence Scholarships (24,000 CAD)

2024

Recipient of the McGill University BMO Responsible AI Fellowships (25,000 CAD)

2023

Recipient of the Mila's MSc Women in AI Excellence Scholarships (10,000 CAD)

2023

Recipient of the McGill University Kharusi Family Science Fellowship (5,000 CAD)

2022

Ranked 13th region-wide and 14th nationwide in M.Sc. university entrance exam

2018

among almost 20,000 participants

Ranked 18th region-wide and 27th nationwide in B.Sc. university entrance exam

2014

among over 190,000 participants

Ranked 2nd in Iranopen competitions by "Intelligent House project"

2012

in Junior Demo Open Challenge league

Memberships

Member of National Elite Foundation

2014 - 2021

Member of the central council of Students’ Scientific Chapter (SSC)

2018

Chief of staff in ACM ICPC - Asia Region

2017

Technical staff in IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics)

2017

Senior executive staff in ACM ICPC - Asia Region

2016

Executive staff in ACM ICPC - Asia Region

2014 - 2015

Skills & Proficiency

Python

PyTorch

Tensorflow

Scikit-Learn