Rate My Professor Zara Maxwell-Smith

Dr. Zara Maxwell-Smith is an interdisciplinary researcher and lecturer in Indonesian Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) at UNSW Canberra. She earned her doctorate in Linguistics from the Australian National University in 2024, with a thesis entitled 'How do teachers of Indonesian choose what to teach? Computational tools to explore usage patterns.' Previously, she taught at the Australian National University from 2013 to 2023, worked across a range of universities and schools, and served as a researcher for the Australian government. Her academic background includes a Graduate Diploma of Education in Secondary Teaching from the University of Canberra in 2012, a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Applied Linguistics from the Australian National University in 2011, and a Bachelor of Asian Studies with a major in Indonesian Language from the same institution in 2011. She is recognized as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2024 and supervises postgraduate research, such as Fadhila Pratiwi's work on the securitisation of cyber security in Indonesia.

Zara Maxwell-Smith's research specializations encompass Indonesian language, linguistics, and politics; politics and culture in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific region; natural language processing, machine learning, and automated speech recognition; equity in artificial intelligence and open-source technologies; as well as Asian literacy and language education. Her influential publications include 'Building Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)' (2018, co-authored with B. Foley et al., 92 citations), 'Applications of natural language processing in bilingual language teaching: an Indonesian-English case study' (2020, with S.G. Ochoa, B. Foley, H. Suominen), 'Scoping natural language processing in Indonesian and Malay for education applications' (2022, with M. Kohler, H. Suominen), 'Developing ASR for Indonesian-English Bilingual Language Teaching' (2021, with B. Foley), 'Automated speech recognition of Indonesian-English language lessons on YouTube using transfer learning' (2023, with B. Foley), and 'Fossicking in Dominant Language Teaching: Javanese and Indonesian ‘Low’ Varieties in Language Teaching Resources' (2021). Among her honors are the Australia Indonesia Institute Indonesian Language Teaching Award in 2022 and a nomination for the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Commendation for Excellence in Education in 2024. Her contributions advance computational linguistics and speech technologies for low-resource languages, particularly in educational contexts for Indonesian.