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Erfan Nourbakhsh
Ph.D. Student in Computer ScienceUniversity of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA)
Erfan Nourbakhsh is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He previously served as a University Instructor, teaching Object-Oriented Programming, and now works as a Graduate Research Assistant.
His research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Graph Neural Networks (GNN), Medical NLP, Biomedical Informatics, AI for Education, and Multimodal AI. He takes an interdisciplinary approach spanning these areas to develop intelligent systems that address challenges in healthcare, education, and multimodal understanding. His work has been accepted at venues including EMNLP, AACL-IJCNLP, SIGDIAL, IEEE EMBS BHI, BioNLP, GEM, and IEEE SaTC.
He was selected for the DAIR3 Program, received the Fan Favorite Award at the Draper Data Science Business Plan Competition and the Outstanding and Innovative Research Award at GSAW 2026, and serves as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2026, GEM 2026, AIES 2026, COLM 2026, EMNLP 2026, and FSS 2026. Beyond academia, he brings industry experience as an AI Specialist, Machine Learning Engineer, and Full-Stack Developer.
News
Sep 2026: Paper "CogAdapt: Adapting Clinical ECG Foundation Models for Wearable Cognitive Load Assessment" accepted at IEEE EMBS BHI 2026.
Sep 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the Mathematical Reasoning and AI (MATH-AI) at NeurIPS 2026.
Sep 2026: Earned Building Agentic AI Applications with Large Language Models from NVIDIA, hosted by the College of AI, Cyber and Computing at UTSA.
Sep 2026: Attended the Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Fall 2026 Review Meeting at UTSA and presented MedProb (EMNLP 2026) and Biomedical RAG (BioNLP @ ACL 2026).
Sep 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for AI for Meta-Science: Scaling and Organizing Science in the Age of AI Scientists at NeurIPS 2026.
Sep 2026: Paper "Prompting Underestimates LLM Capability for Time Series Classification" accepted at AACL-IJCNLP 2026 as a Main conference paper.
Aug 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the Medical Reasoning with Vision Language Foundation Models (Med-Reasoner) at NeurIPS 2026.
Aug 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the AI-Native Academia: Authorship, Peer Review, and Conference Governance under AI at NeurIPS 2026.
Aug 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the Trustworthy AI for Good (AI4GOOD) Workshop at NeurIPS 2026.
Aug 2026: Paper "MedProb: Probing Internal Representations of Vision-Language Models for Medical Question Answering" accepted at EMNLP 2026.
Aug 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing at EMNLP 2026.
Jul 2026: Paper "TRACER: Early Failure Detection for Task-Oriented Dialogue" accepted at SIGDIAL 2026.
Jul 2026: Invited to serve as an ethics reviewer for NeurIPS 2026.
Jul 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the Generative AI for the World: Globalizing Tasks, Evaluations, and Systems Workshop at COLM 2026.
Jun 2026: Invited to serve as a reviewer for the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026 / AAAI 2026).
Jun 2026: Awarded the Certification for Associate from the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL @ UTSA).
May 2026: Paper "When Retrieval Doesn't Help: A Large-Scale Study of Biomedical RAG" published at BioNLP 2026, colocated with ACL 2026.
Apr 2026: Received a Travel Award to Attend ACL 2026 from the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA).
Apr 2026: Received a Travel Award to Attend ACL 2026 from the Graduate School, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA).
Apr 2026: Won the Fan Favorite Award at the Draper Data Science Business Plan Competition.
Apr 2026: Received the Outstanding and Innovative Research Award for my research poster during Graduate Student Appreciation Week (GSAW 2026).
Apr 2026: Paper "Are LLM Benchmarks Already Contaminated? A Systematic Review of Contamination Detection Methods" received an Outstanding Paper award at GEM 2026, colocated with ACL 2026.
Apr 2026: Served as a reviewer for GEM 2026.
Apr 2026: Received the MATRIX AI Scholar: Neuro-Inspired AI for the Edge award from UTSA.
Mar 2026: Paper "Optimizing Task Scheduling in Fog Computing with Deadline Awareness" accepted to the 2nd IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy CyberInfrastructure for IoT and Microelectronics (SaTC 2026).
Mar 2026: Paper "Unveiling User Perceptions in the Generative AI Era: A Sentiment-Driven Evaluation of AI Educational Apps' Role in Digital Transformation of e-Teaching" accepted at ICeLeT 2026 as an oral paper.
Mar 2026: Papers "Prompting Underestimates LLM Capability for Time Series Classification" and "Detecting Incompleteness in Feature Requests: Leveraging Codebase-Augmented LLMs in Open-Source Software" accepted at Texas NLP Symposium 2026.
Feb 2026: Selected to participate in the Data and AI Intensive Research with Rigor and Reproducibility (DAIR3) Program at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Feb 2026: Received the Roadrunner Teaching Assistant Academy Certificate from UTSA.
Jan 2026: Began serving as University Instructor at UTSA, teaching Object-Oriented Programming (OOP).
Dec 2025: Received multiple ACUE certifications: Promoting Active Learning, Facilitating Engaging Class Discussions, Planning Effective Class Discussions.
Oct 2025: Named the #1 Most Active Participant at San Antonio Startup Week (SASW) 2025.
Oct 2025: Paper "KD-OCT: Efficient Knowledge Distillation for Clinical-Grade Retinal OCT Classification" accepted at ICSPIS 2025.
Oct 2025: Received Teaching Powerful Note-Taking Skills and Developing Effective Class Sessions and Lectures certificates from ACUE.
Oct 2025: Received Synthetic Data AI Agents and OpenEnv Challenge certificate from PyTorch.
Aug 2025: Began teaching CS 2113: Fundamentals of OOP at UTSA (Aug–Dec 2025).
Aug 2025: Received Roadrunner Teaching Assistantship Academy 2025 – Right Foot Badge from UTSA Academic Innovation.
Aug 2025: Google AI Essentials Certificate from Google.
Jul 2025: GitHub Copilot Challenge Certificate from Microsoft.
Jun 2025: Teaching Philosophy Workshop Certificate from UTSA (CIRTL@UTSA, led by Dr. Jesus Romo).
May 2025: Attended NSF AI Spring School 2025.
May 2025: Accepted to ComSciCon Houston 2025.
May 2025: Started as Graduate Research Assistant at UTSA.
May 2025: AI Agents Fundamentals Certificate from Hugging Face.
Apr 2025: Received MATRIX AI Scholar: Neuro-Inspired AI for the Edge Certificate from UTSA.
Jan 2025: Started PhD in Computer Science at UTSA (GPA: 4.0). Honored to be selected as a TOP PhD applicant for the CS PhD program at UTSA for Fall 2024.
Dec 2024: Paper "ConHGNN-SUM: A Contextualized Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Extractive Text Summarization" published at AISP 2024.
Feb 2024: Received 9th Winter Seminar Series (WSS) Certificate from Sharif University of Technology.
Dec 2023: Joined the Computer Society of Iran.
Oct 2023: Took on the role of University Lecturer, instructing a computer skills workshop course for undergraduate students majoring in computer engineering at the University of Isfahan.
Oct 2023: Joined ICELET2024 as a member of the informatics committee.
Selected Publications
IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI 2026)
The 5th Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics & the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP 2026) | Main Conference Paper
The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026) | Findings Paper
The 27th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2026)
Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM 2026), colocated with ACL 2026 | Outstanding Paper