Rate My Professor Reza Haffari

Reza Haffari is a Professor in the Department of Data Science & AI within Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University in 2010, Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from Sharif University of Technology in 2002, and Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2000. In addition to his professorial role, he serves as Director, Engagement (DSAI) for the Vision and Language group, having previously directed the Vision and Language Group from 2020 to 2024. Since 2022, Haffari has been Head of Language and Speech Processing at Openstream AI. He has contributed to faculty governance as a member of both the Faculty Research Committee and Faculty Education Committee since 2016. Haffari is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow for 2020-2025 and received the Google Faculty Research Award in 2019 for work in machine translation. He teaches courses such as FIT5201 Data Analysis Algorithms, FIT3080 Intelligent Systems, and FIT4009 Advanced Topics in Intelligent Systems.

Haffari's research centers on artificial intelligence, with emphasis on low-level perception and high-level reasoning under uncertainty, primarily from text but extending to vision and speech modalities. His interests encompass natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, effective training of neural networks with minimal supervision through human interaction for lifelong learning, explaining black-box models for trust in critical applications like digital health, neuro-symbolic AI agents, knowledge graphs with large language models, continual learning, reliable and safe LLMs, and multilingual/multimodal foundation models. Applications include text/speech translation, question-answering, and dialogue systems. His scholarship is evidenced by 24,436 citations, an h-index of 52, and an i10-index of 177 on Google Scholar. Prominent publications include "Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning" (ICLR 2024), "Graph-constrained Reasoning: Faithful Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models" (ICLR 2025), "Audio Is the Achilles’ Heel: Red Teaming Audio Large Multimodal Models" (NAACL 2025), "Continual Speech Learning with Fused Speech Features" (INTERSPEECH 2025), "Extending LLMs to New Languages: A Case Study of Llama and Persian Adaptation" (COLING 2025), and "Medical Visual Question Answering: A Survey" (Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2023). Haffari leads projects like TMLGenAI: Trustworthy Generative AI, Lifelong Version-controlled Code Generation, and SEA-AI: Neuro-Symbolic Enhanced Autonomy for Maritime Scene Understanding.