Bio
Dr. Tirthankar Ghosal is a scientist at the Advanced AI Methods at Scale (AAIMS) group in the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At ORNL he works on Natural Language Processing (NLP) of scientific texts to build foundation models for science, which would cater to specific downstream use cases for researchers. Dr. Ghosal obtained his doctoral degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna with a specialization in Natural Language Processing. He did his PostDoc from the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL) at Charles University, Czech Republic. Before joining ORNL, he was the Head of Research at SciSpace, a Palo Alto-based company, where he led a team of NLP researchers on various problems related to computational processing of scientific articles to counter the scholarly information overload. In community roles, Dr. Ghosal has been/is the organizer and area-chair of premier NLP, AI, ScholComm conferences (INLG, EMNLP, IJCAI, FORCE11), workshops (SDP, WIESP, ArgKG, SummDial, METRICS), and shared tasks/generation challenges (AutoMin, MuP, DEAL, SciVer, FOCAL). He is an active promoter of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and was associated with the Widening NLP initiative as a chair, EquiCL as a current board member, and co-chaired the DEI initiatives in NLP conferences like ACL, AACL-IJCNLP, and NAACL. Outside work, Tirthankar spends most of his time with his family, especially playing with his two-year-old daughter. He enjoys reading literature in his native language (Bengali), travelling places, and cooking Indian dishes.